One of the most perplexing questions for e-Learning departments is, “Which authoring tool(s) should we adopt?” The answer is hardly ever simple because even within the same organization, there may be a variety of courses that need to be delivered, each with its own unique requirements. Not only that, the optimal solution for any given learning need may require a combination of two or more tools rather than just one, which only adds to the complexity of the question. Finally, the developers themselves may have their preferences, whether or not these preferences coincide with the best tool for the job. This too can lead to good or bad decisions about tool selection.
There are, of course, many authoring systems on the market. Brandon Hall recently published Authoring Tool Knowledge Base: a Buyer’s Guide to the Best E-Learning Content Development Applications. This report identifies 88 different authoring systems, but these are only some of the authoring tools available today — there are more. Besides the commercially available authoring tools, there are many more applications that have been created by companies for in-house use when none of the readily available authoring systems met their needs.
Marketing mania
Why is there so much confusion over authoring
systems? In part it is because of the unrealistic marketing claims made by so many
of the companies that sell these systems. This is nothing new: I remember a two
page marketing advertisement back in 1992 in New Media Magazine that claimed
that an average user of the advertised authoring tool (here unnamed to protect
the guilty) could create a complete lesson on the proper use of a coffee maker
in 20 minutes flat. I was already an expert in that authoring system at that
time and knew that it would take me at least a full day to do that task. It is
no different today. Across the board, marketing for e-Learning applications
often employs the same set of hackneyed claims: this product will not only
create the best e-Learning possible, but it will do it for the least amount of
money in the least amount of time. Good, fast, and cheap: nirvana has been
reached, pack the bags, baby, we’re going to
Strengths and weaknesses
The truth is that each authoring system has its own strengths and weaknesses. Any one of them might do the trick for you, but often you’ll find that a single system is not enough if you want that elusive combination of fast, cheap, and great. There are two primary reasons for this:
- A single tool may not be capable of doing what you want to do.
- A given tool may be capable of doing what you want to do, but at a high cost, in terms of:
- more time needed, or
- more skills and resources required, or
- the job requires additional modules, plug-ins, or other tools sold by the toolmaker.
Tools, tools and more tools
There is no question that Macromedia, recently acquired by Adobe, has been the 800 pound gorilla in the e-Learning tools marketplace for the past several years:
- Its revered old-timer, Authorware, continues to be made fresh with each new version.
- Flash, the ubiquitous consumer animation tool, has made great strides in delivering e-Learning and in fact is used extensively by most e-Learning organizations today.
- Captivate, the tool that was RoboDemo before Macromedia acquired eHelp, is wonderful at what it does and has found a place in many e-Learning shops.
- Macromedia’s newest tool, Breeze, has made strides in delivering training to the masses quickly.
Add to these DreamWeaver, the website creation tool that has been used for delivering HTML and JavaScript based e-Learning when plug-ins just won’t do. Another Macromedia product, Director, is being eclipsed more and more by Flash, but still has a loyal fan base that often uses it to deliver e-Learning. All in all, Macromedia is a company that offers a variety of tools that have been used for e-Learning creation, even though those same tools are used for other purposes.
Finally, I recognize that a great many other companies have been vying for market share with tools of their own. Over the years, I have seen promising tools fail in the marketplace, some because their initial offering was not polished enough, some because the creators lacked financing, and some because their marketing was either nonexistent or stank to high heaven.
What about PowerPoint?
Ah, yes, PowerPoint — the product that far and away is probably the most commonly used vehicle for delivering “learning” to employees and others. Most designers would agree that it is difficult to create excellent e-Learning in PowerPoint, or at least that producing learning takes a lot more work than simply throwing together bullet slides. Yet we have all seen many PowerPoint presentations, bullet slides and all, presented as e-Learning to employees who are forced to undergo this mind-numbing torture — with predictable results. As a product, PowerPoint is best used for its original purpose — to display information — and not for instruction, at least not on its own.
However, PowerPoint can certainly have a place in the e-Learning world, especially when you are organizing content from subject matter expert materials, from meeting presentations, and from other sources of information, and then converting that content to another, interactive, format that can then be used in e-Learning applications. To this end, there are many products, such as Articulate, that will convert PowerPoint to Flash or some other medium where you can add interactive elements that PowerPoint does not natively include. At a recent ASTD conference, I was blown away by the number of PowerPoint converters I saw in the exhibit area. This proves that either there is a market for them or, as Guy Kawasaki said in his recent keynote speech at The eLearning Producer Conference and Expo 2005, they may just be examples of stupid companies producing a stupid product that competes with so many other stupid products. Certainly there will be mergers, acquisitions, and strangulations occurring in this marketplace, so many of these converters will be gone in the future.
There must be a better way
To learn to use an authoring system may take hours, days, or weeks, depending on the complexity and number of features in that system. However, the learning curve gets steeper when you start mastering the skills required to combine files from different authoring systems. For that reason, I am finding it worthwhile to proactively help people in my courses learn to use Flash, Captivate, Authorware, Breeze and even Power-Point together in their projects. Designers and developers who thoroughly understand the advantages, the nuts and bolts and, of course, the pitfalls, of combining tools create much better solutions. While it’s hard to beat the hands-on classroom experience, I’ve written this article to give you an overview of, and some insight into, the possibilities for getting those four authoring tools and PowerPoint to play well together. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1 These tools can be combined to make complete e-Learning solutions.
Let’s take a quick look at each of the tools first, focusing on their “native” applications before looking at how they can be combined.
