The elearning authoring tools market is going through a burst of innovation, driven by a desire for ever-greater speed and ease of use. This as been accelerated further by the adoption of AI by the leading elearning companies, and here we present some of our favourite digital learning tools that emphasise innovation.
Super rapid, super slick
imc’s Express builds on decades of experience creating some of the best training solutions, and here we are talking super rapid content development that can be used by pretty much anyone to build out digital content quickly and easily. With just 10 minutes, you can be flying.
We’ve already signposted imc Express as one of the best examples of leveraging AI for elearning content creation and maximising productivity for L&D teams or subject matter experts. However, in 2023, the imc team took this to another level.
Express now integrates ChatGPT technology and makes it extremely easy for anyone – without any previous learning design or techie experience – to create elearning modules in minutes…
The training is very good, including a tutorial mode with contextual help to ensure you build out good learning and help pages.
If you have a lot of material to create or convert and not a lot of time, Express is a great option. This tool is 3 to 4 times quicker to create learning content than the market leaders, and perfect for making dry documents into learning resources rapidly.
Favourite features:
- Super rapid content development
- Good learning design principles (Didactics – designed in)
- 60 languages supported out of the box with voice and text translation done automatically
- AI can generate translated subtitles for videos
- Easy drag and drop of learning assets into a course that are automatically added to your content library and tagged (very neat)
- Collaborative development
- Outputs to SCORM 1.2 and 2004, as e-book, MS word or as a link
Learn more about content creation with imc Express.
A Complete Suite
iSpring Suite Max with iSpring Space
If PowerPoint is your chosen medium to build from, then iSpring was the way to go. iSpring is easy to use and has an awful lot of flexibility and capability.
However, i-Spring Suite Max now has a lot more capability. The all new iSpring Space offers browser-based development capabilities and manages the learning assets to allow for sharing and their re-use. iSpring Space allows for the developing of micro learning, which is now exceptionally well catered for.
Favourite features:
- Collaborative development
- Micro learning development capability
- Article editor feature (very cool)
- Create video-based learning with powerful editing and polishing tools
- Super quiz development capabilities, probably the best on the market
Learn more about iSpring Suite Max and iSpring Space.
Lighthouse content creation made easy
Open eLMS Creator is a well evolved authoring environment that just keeps getting better and better. With its 3d background effect it is incredibly easy to build elearning that is in the context of your organisation’s workplace.
Add a narrator and the learning is starting to look really impactful. With a devotion to ergonomics the company behind Open eLMS Creator really gets how to create a tool that produces highly visual “lighthouse content” easily.
Favourite features:
- 3d template approach
- 1000 or more different templated backgrounds
- Narrator feature (a green screen filmed narrator is yours to use)
- Able to update content in situ in an LMS (no downloading, amending and re-uploading here).
- Alexa does the audio narration for you
Learn more about Open eLMS Creator.
Elegant, easy and effective
Nimble Author keeps things simple and it does it superbly well. With sound instructional design principles designed into Nimble Author it is easy to build out e-learning quickly and easily. Nimble handles interactions well and really does make life easy to build content.
Nimble allows you to build learning through the eyes of the learner. The material design approach meaning a familiar and intuitive interface for learner and creator.
Favourite features:
- The learner view is very good and easy to switch through to
- Templates are provided to build the learning in
- The rule of digestibility – Nimble Author2 will tell you if you have too much content on the page
- In situ screen editing meaning no need to storyboard (this is my favourite feature)
- The Nimble support promise……get stuck and the guys from Nimble will lend a hand…no problem.
Learn more about Nimble Author.
