What programs do you need to do e-learning?

E-learning is usually developed with what is called an authoring tool.

An authoring tool is a tool where you can assemble text, audio, images, and video into what you could call multimedia presentations. You can also create interactive elements, such as quizzes, and publish the content to the SCORM standard.

There are many different authoring tools. The defunct online reference work www.elearningatlas.com had almost 250 different tools in November 2019. My guess is that this is too low and that the number is more likely at least twice as large. In short, there are two large suppliers of E-learning authoring tools and then a sea of smaller manufacturers and Open Source products.

Fortunately, it can be boiled down to a few relevant tools pretty quickly.

Articulate Storyline

In 2012, the first version of Articulate Storyline was released. It was a revolution. Before the first time, you had a tool that was both reasonably easy to learn to use, productive to work with, and at the same time had a very high degree of flexibility and technical capabilities. Until then, if a product was easy to learn and easy to use, then what you could do was typically quite limited. You worked in predefined templates with little opportunity to deviate from or expand what the template allowed. Conversely, products with high flexibility were typically difficult to learn to use, and not particularly productive to work with. You had to be a bit of a programmer to use them, and that's how they looked. The user interface in Articulate Storyline is clearly inspired by Microsoft PowerPoint, which makes it easy and intuitive to get started. It is a good balance between options and usability, which makes it very productive to work with, and you still have the opportunity to program very advanced solutions - but that is usually not needed.

It's clear that the company behind Articulate Storyline has had a clear vision to create a cohesive product from the start. It's also clear that e-learning and Storyline are their main priority: Compared to many other American technology companies, they have pretty good support and they've worked hard to build a lot of good resources online where users can help each other and exchange tips and tricks. They release free updates with bug fixes and new features fairly frequently.

Articulate Storyline 360

In 2014, Storyline 2 was released, and in 2016, Storyline was incorporated into Articulate 360, which is a suite containing several products, under the name Articulate Storyline 360. At the same time, Articulate changed their licensing model to a subscription that you have to pay annually, a controversial step at the time. Presumably to address the criticism, Articulate Storyline 3 was released in 2017, which can be purchased with a one-time payment without an ongoing subscription. In all essence, Storyline 360 and Storyline 3 are identical with a few exceptions. The most important difference is, of course, that Storyline 3 does not include access to the other resources that are included in the Articulate Storyline 360 suite, such as access to an online media library with 1.5 million images and much more.

The other products in the Articulate 360 suite are:

Articulate Rise 360

An online authoring tool that is very easy to use, but compared to Articulate Storyline, you have somewhat fewer options. Rise is template-based and there is quite a limited amount of change you can make in terms of functionality and design. On the other hand, it is very easy to use, and you can actually create some really nice content with Rise, especially if you incorporate video. Rise has two advantages compared to Storyline. The overriding difference is that the content is responsive, which means that it changes size - and position - depending on how big a screen it is displayed on. This means that if you need to create content to be displayed on a mobile phone, Rise is in many cases a better choice than Storyline. That said, Storyline content can actually be displayed on a mobile phone, but the content is not responsive, but scales to fit the size. Where StoryLine is a program you install on your computer, Rise is an online tool that you work with through the browser. One of the advantages of this is that Rise allows multiple users to collaborate on the same platform. Rise can publish content to LMS (SCORM), Web and PDF. Rise has access to the same online media library with 1.5 million images as Storyline.

Articulate Replay 360

Articulate Replay makes it easy to record what's happening on your screen, while recording yourself using your computer's webcam. Ideal for recording a powerpoint presentation that you want to put online. Very easy to work with, very simple editing options. Compared to professional video editing tools, it falls short. But you can create a reasonably good quality in almost no time. Articulate Replay is a program that is installed on your computer and where you work with the files locally. The content is published as video in MP4 format, not as SCORM packages and you cannot create interactive content or quizzes with Articulate Replay. That's not the point of the product either. You can easily integrate a video you have produced with Replay into Storyline or Rise.

Peek 360

Peek is a program that lets you record what's happening on your computer screen and upload it to Review 360 (see next program) so you can share your recording with others. The possibilities for use are not that great.

Reviews 360

Review, on the other hand, is really useful. It is an online tool that you can use when proofreading your content. It is super easy to use: You publish content to Review 360 from, for example, Storyline or Rise. Share a link with those who are going to proofread. They can now see that content and comment directly in Review, and you can reply to their comments. A very useful tool

Articulate Studio 360

Lets you develop e-learning from PowerPoint. A "precursor" to Storyline whose relevance, in my opinion, disappeared when Storyline came to the market.

Overall, the Articulate 360 suite is almost impossible to avoid if you want to do e-learning.

Adobe Captivate

The first version was released in 2002 under the name RoboDemo and was bought by Adobe in 2004 and renamed Captivate. Adobe is a giant company that many people may know from their many graphic tools such as Photoshop or Illustrator. Adobe is also behind the PDF and Flash formats. RoboDemo was originally developed as a tool for making screen captures , i.e. recording what you do on the screen on a small video with the aim of developing training in using software. Since then, support has been added for developing other types of e-learning. I have used Captivate for many years and also taught others to use it, but I must admit that it is some time ago. I stopped using it at one time because I think the user interface is unnecessarily difficult to find my way around, even for an experienced user, and I think it has the characteristics of being an old product that has developed by budding rather than a coherent vision. I also think that you can sense that e-learning and Captivate are only a small corner of Adobe's huge business and that it is therefore sometimes left a little behind.

Despite this criticism, Adobe is clearly one of the better products on the market. It can really do a lot of things and is reasonably stable to work with. It is the only serious alternative to Articulate Storyline that I can think of. But as you may have guessed, we use Articulate Storyline and Rise.

Are there any good, free, authoring tools?

I regularly research what authoring tools are available, and of course I am particularly interested in good free products. My conclusion is that I don't think any of the free products I have seen are worth the effort. They are either a bit difficult to use with either a programmer-like or very template-like approach. What you save compared to buying a license for Articulate 360, you quickly make up for in lost productivity and poor quality.

Another thing to consider when choosing an authoring tool: If you choose a product that is not backed by a large company, you risk that development on your authoring tool will stop - and you will then be in a situation where you cannot update your content.

Other tools for digital learning

It is important to remember that people can get information from and learn from digital materials without it necessarily having to be SCORM compliant. The above products have SCORM as their focal point, but if that is not important to you and you just want a simple introductory video for new employees to be on your company's intranet, then grab your mobile phone and make a video. Or make a digital presentation. Here are some tools that I think are relevant to mention in the context of digital learning/dissemination, but which are not SCORM compliant. And it is worth noting that the content in many of the tools below can be embedded in authoring tools, for example as a video.

Vyond - formerly GoAnimate

Vyond is an online tool that you can use to make movies. You've probably seen a movie made with Vyond before, as they're used for many so-called Explainer videos. We're pretty crazy about Vyond. It's easy to learn how to make videos that look alive. It's pretty quick to work with. There are a ton of backgrounds, objects, and people to choose from.

The drawings are available in three “lines”:

• Contemporary , which is quite neutral.
• Business friendly , cartoonish but in a good way that can be used in a business context
• Whiteboard Animation using black and white line drawings

It is possible to create your own custom characters and it is also possible to upload your own graphics and sounds. One of the things we love most is that if you drag a character into a scene, it is not just a still image. The character moves a little during the scene, even if you do not “ask” it to. Not so much movement that it is disturbing, but enough that it does not become boring to look at. It would be nice if you could add elements, such as logos to characters, but that is the only complaint. Apart from the fact that we do not understand why the service changed its name from GoAnimate to Vyond. Both are to be expected…

Vyond integrates nicely with, for example, Articulate Storyline and Rise.

Did I mention that we really love Vyond?

Prezi

An online tool for making smaller presentations. Good Prezi presentations look quite convincing. The idea in Prezi is that you have your entire presentation on one large digital canvas, and then you move the “camera” around this canvas and zoom in and out. It is especially good to use if you want to show connections between elements visually. It is fairly easy to learn, but as with many other things, you can spend a long time making a good presentation.

VideoScribe

Do you know those videos where there is a hand drawing everything that appears on the screen? But unless it was hand-drawn, it was probably made with VideoScribe. VideoScribe is a program that you install and run from a PC. It is relatively easy to use. You can import your own images into it, but you can also use images from the included library of stock images. I think they are a little outdated to look at. Fortunately, you can turn off the “drawing hand” so that images are drawn out magically. It is a wheel because the hand can be a little annoying to look at in the long run. I think it is a nice tool, but perhaps it has had its time.

Sway

Sway is a free online tool from Microsoft where you can, among other things, make presentations. Very easy to use. Quite limited options for what you can do, but it's a nice little tool for smaller presentations.

Do you think there is a tool missing from this page?

So contact us and tell us why we should check out your favorite tool.

Do you want to? learn more?

We hold courses where you can learn how to develop e-learning.

If you'd rather learn it on your own, will these articles might interest you.

• Self-determination theory. The most important theory you need to know about learning.
• Coercive design – how not to design e-learning .
• Your brain is NOT a computer - Predictive Coding
• Flick 2 learn. Why Interactive elearning is NOT always exciting elearning
• Gamification

If you want to know more about the technology behind digital learning and e-learning, you can read our E-learning FAQs .

... and are you looking for help developing exciting e-learning , or would you like to learn how to create exciting e-learning yourself - then give us a shout.