The Importance of e-Learning Authoring Tools
Posted by Brittany Dengerud on Thu, Jun 25, 2009 @ 05:51 PM
by Michael Allen, CEO
Thanks so very much to you and all the ASTD ICE attendees who have signed up to help us examine what authoring tools are and aren’t doing for us in e-learning. In recent years, it seems to me we’ve largely been left to either 1) use general purpose development tools (which means the going is hard and many excellent possibilities have to be compromised) or 2) use tools that belittle both instructional challenges and the complexity of instructional product creation.
Our processes are complex and almost always occur in an organizational context which adds further complexity. We need assistance from the analysis and ideation phase to translation, database management, LMS interface, evaluation, and so much more.
General purpose tools, while they may be ubiquitous and enduring, provide so little of the needed solution. And most tools focused on learning simply sneer at the true complexity of powerful learning events, substituting instead multiple-choice and drag-and-drop question editors. Although organizations blessed with teams of power programmers can meet the challenge, they do so at major expense and often with unavoidable inefficiency due to the lack of appropriate tools.
The question is, then, if there were to be a suite of e-learning authoring tools that provided just what we need, what would it look like?
In concert with the iterative methodology our studios use for the design and development of e-learning applications, we’re prototyping to see what we can come up with. It’s my plan to put prototypes in your hands and ask for your evaluation.
We’re going through another prototype iteration just now, and because we aren’t a tool vendor with lots of user support available, we’ve decided to distribute the upcoming prototype rather than the one demonstrated at ICE. It will be “smoother” and more easily explored. And it won’t be long before it hatches—sometime this fall, as it looks now. Please be patient.
In the meantime, we’d very much like to continue the dialogue about the importance of tools and the nature of what we really should have. So, please share your thoughts and we’ll do likewise.