Course authoring software

You're in the process of learning and development, and your staff is in desperate need of training. Delivering a digital learning experience, however, might set you back thousands of dollars and many hours if you don't have the necessary tools. It is virtually hard to supply current training programs on your own, from start, in a timely manner. The average 20-minute course takes close to 80 hours to construct. Not to mention that manually preparing and packaging files in order to create courses that are consistent with SCORM or other learning standards takes extra effort.

Without an authoring tool, creating courses requires coding expertise or an in-house developer. In the absence of either, you are virtually helpless. An authoring tool makes it simple and quick to design digital courses for people with little to no developer experience. However, learning experience platforms with integrated authoring features are an even better choice.

With a built-in authoring tool, your preferred platform becomes native to the convenience of an authoring tool. But these are only a few of the advantages of a built-in authoring tool. Let's start by examining the benefits of course authoring tools.

What is a Course Authoring Tool?

Course Authoring Tool is a type of tool that enable users to develop and distribute customized interactive educational content. For training, education, and performance evaluation reasons, course authoring tools enable users to develop, distribute, operate, and manage eLearning assets like video, audio, tests, quizzes, surveys, graphs, assignments, and more. Gamification tools, branding possibilities, and centralized file storage can all be found in course authoring tools. Because course authoring tools are adaptable, they can produce content for both formal and informal learning environments.

Course Authoring Tools are extremely configurable, making them a quick and easy way to deliver unique and branded training, onboarding, and exams. With the aid of course authoring tools, users may effortlessly exchange assets, data, and documents with learners, clients, and stakeholders as needed. Finally, Course Authoring Tools analyzes student behavior data, gathers user input, and monitors student conduct, enabling authors to dynamically and continually enhance the eLearning process.

Due to their shared capabilities, course authoring tools and eLearning content providers are sometimes used interchangeably in discussions. But there is a significant distinction between them. With a toolkit offered by course authoring tools, users can develop intricate, interactive content specific to their organization's requirements. Without offering powerful user course authoring capabilities, eLearning Content Providers offer prebuilt libraries of content for industry-specific training and education.

Benefits of Course Authoring Tool:

The advantages of authoring tools go well beyond just enabling content creation for almost everyone.

Through authoring tools, anyone may develop courses:

Without an authoring tool, as we've already indicated, you'll need a developer or coding expertise to produce courses of a professional caliber. This alone wastes time and money. But more crucially, this implies that a lot of concepts remain untested. An authoring tool provides you or a member of your team the ability to function independently once you have a concept for a course or training module.

Authoring tools provide faster scaling:

Your learning and development requirements will increase as your business expands. You can meet the rising demand for additional education and training inside your organization by using authoring tools.

Being able to produce material rapidly is necessary to meet demand. You will take longer and spend more money if you hire a developer. You depend on your developer's availability whenever your course has to be updated. Additionally, if you are a developer, you must manually update and test the courses to make sure they function properly after changes are made.

Using authoring tools facilitates course iteration:

When a course is created manually, it may produce proprietary code that needs extensive modification. This makes it challenging to reuse outdated courses as models for fresh content because additional revisions to the code will be required.

Instead of manually updating course materials, you can far more easily create new content by copying an existing piece, making the necessary changes, and publishing it.

Suggested: Best corporate learning management systems

Course authoring software - Top 10 platforms comparison

Pricing

$470/month

Free Version Availability

Yes

Suitable For

Medium and large companies

You may develop expert eLearning material, including interactive courses, quizzes, training videos, role-play simulations, SCORM-compliant e-books, and interactions, using the full authoring toolkit known as iSpring Suite. It is also a user-friendly tool with hardly any learning curve, which is ideal when working against a deadline. For even quicker course authoring, iSpring Suite also includes a sizable library of eLearning resources and templates. It also features an online workspace where you can save content, collaborate with your team on it, and share it with stakeholders for evaluation and approval. Courses created with iSpring Suite may be published to any of the current eLearning standards, including SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, AICC, cmi5, and xAPI (Tin Can), making them 100% interoperable with any LMS. They can also be converted to HTML5 format for flawless playing on any device. You may simply design courses that are customized to your brand thanks to the toolkit's broad collection of customization capabilities. Additionally, it has pre-built player themes that enable you to quickly create courses with a polished appearance. Every day, iSpring Suite helps thousands of eLearning developers save time.

Pricing

$1299/year

Free Version Availability

No

Suitable For

Medium and large companies

The award-winning authoring programs Storyline 360 and Rise 360 for producing courses that look stunning on all devices are included in Articulate 360, an annual subscription that provides course developers with everything they need for course production. An ever-expanding collection of over 9 million course resources, including as stock images, templates, characters, symbols, and videos, that make it simple to develop stunning courses more quickly. a web-based project evaluation tool for quickly compiling stakeholder feedback. Additionally, they can take advantage of live and recorded training webinars to improve their knowledge of Articulate 360 and their capacity as course developers. A subscription to Articulate 360 includes ongoing updates that add new functionality to all the apps and resources.

Pricing

$250/month

Free Version Availability

Yes

Suitable For

Small and medium sized companies

Udutu is a free online platform for creating courses. You can design a variety of activities, including exams, interactive modules, and branching scenarios, using the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs that are included. Similar to iSpring Free, it enables you to turn your PowerPoint slides into online courses, however, this option costs $10 per month for a subscription. You can download SCORM packages of courses on your computer. The program also allows you to upload and edit SCORMs that have already been written.

Udutu makes it simple for numerous authors to work together on a course and review it in real-time, in contrast to many other authoring tools.

Pricing

USD 2.95 to 5.95/user/month

Free Version Availability

Yes

Suitable For

Small, medium and large companies

EdApp can liven up your educational materials. We at EdApp are on a mission to revolutionize workplace learning. Through our free mobile-first learning platform, we're making more education accessible to everyone in order to get there. Because, regardless of the profession or location, we think everyone should have access to excellent onboarding, training, and learning materials. With EdApp's creator tool, you can produce a brief microlearning course in a matter of minutes rather than weeks. courses that are completely pre-made and customizable in the course library.

Utilize the admin portal to take control of your users, content, and data. Using the mobile-first learner portal, you can involve your teams and accomplish your training objectives. and have access to tools like gamification, push notifications, in-person evaluations, spaced repetition, and more. Learning at work thus resembles more play than labor. What's best? For those who require us to be, we are unapologetically free. Through our free course collection, we collaborate with the UN to offer free lessons to thousands of students every day. Every day, learners from 90 different countries and more than 100 different languages take more than 80,000 lessons, whether they are self-taught or employed by major, international corporations.

Pricing

$199/month

Free Version Availability

Yes

Suitable For

Small, medium and large companies

Another free authoring tool for creating interactive eLearning courses that can be uploaded to an LMS or published to the web is CourseLab version 2.4. It enables you to generate content using the WYSIWYG approach, just like many other programs. However, non-technical users and developers may find it difficult to use CourseLab due to the interface's archaic appearance and lack of intuitiveness.

Due to its vast feature set, this application may be a suitable choice for tech enthusiasts. Slide-based courses with pictures, movies, intricate multi-object interactions, and quizzes are possible. A substantial number of pre-made eLearning module templates are included with CourseLab, albeit it may take some time to learn how to utilize and modify them.

Pricing

NA

Free Version Availability

NA

Suitable For

Medium and large companies

You must utilize the useful knowledge that your employees possess. By transforming their experts into champions for the growth of their partners, customers, and employees, 360Learning enables businesses to upskill internally. Instead of using top-down training, L&D teams can hasten upskilling with the aid of internal experts and our LMS for collaborative learning. The simplest way to enable customers, train teams that interact with customers, and onboard and upskill employees is through 360Learning. At 1,700 organizations, 360Learning drives the future of work. 360Learning, which was founded in 2013, has 300+ team members spread across New York, Paris, and London, and has raised $240 million.

Pricing

NA

Free Version Availability

NA

Suitable For

Small, medium and large companies

The tools to equip client-facing teams with the knowledge and abilities they need to perform at the highest level are provided by Brainshark's data-driven sales readiness platform. Customers can make sure their sales reps are always prepared to make the most of any selling situation by providing them with best-of-breed solutions for training and coaching as well as cutting-edge insights into sales performance. Companies can use Brainshark to enable sales teams with on-demand training that expedites onboarding and keeps reps current, validate readiness with sales coaching and practice that guarantees reps master key messages, empower teams with dynamic content that can be created quickly, updated easily, and accessed from any location, and use powerful scorecards to visualize sales performance trends and establish direct links between improved readiness and increased revenue.

Pricing

NA

Free Version Availability

Yes

Suitable For

Small and medium companies

Elucidat is a robust authoring platform that is entirely cloud-based and created to enable any user to create high-quality digital learning on a global scale and on any device. You can produce training 4x faster than ever before and give learners the "wow" factors - quicker and easier than ever before - with the help of an intelligent yet straightforward interface, streamlined workflows, and tools that do the heavy lifting. Elucidat was developed to aid teams in increasing the production of e-learning. You can invite all of your stakeholders, from your learning designers to subject matter experts, to collaborate within the platform thanks to user roles and permissions that are customizable. Elucidat's authoring platform creates top-notch, SCORM-compliant HTML5 elearning content as a next-generation authoring tool. Elucidat is regarded as one of the best SCORM elearning authoring tools for Mac and Windows because it supports the majority of elearning formats, as well as providing sophisticated xAPI data reporting and mobile responsive content.

Pricing

NA

Free Version Availability

NA

Suitable For

Instruqt is a product-led virtual IT lab. Through providing interactive product experiences through the browser, we assist software companies in generating demand at scale and boosting adoption and usage. In a secure lab setting, Instruqt runs a running instance of your software. Using real-world scenarios, infrastructure, and technology, you can create product tutorials, demos, and training in the lab setting.

Pricing

NA

Free Version Availability

No

Suitable For

The FLOWSPARKS Group has extensive experience creating online learning modules. A fully functional FLOWSPARKS Suite has been created as a result of this vision. Combining the Learning Formats, Smart Templates, and Smart Programs in the FLOWSPARKS Authoring Tool makes it simple to create interactive e-Learning. You can combine this with our robust Learning Management System (LMS) to create the best possible digital learning environment.

Top 10 best course authoring software comparison

Product Pricing Free Trail Content Creation Ratings Industries
iSpring Suite $470 Yes 9.1/10 4.7/5 E-Learning
Articulate 360 $1,299 Per user, annually No 9.2/10 4.5/5 E-Learning
Udutu $250 Yes 8.6/10 4.2/5 Professional Training and Coaching
EdApp Free Yes 8.9/10 4.8/5 E-Learning
CourseLab $199 Yes 9.2/10 4.8/5 Education Management
360 Learning NA No 8.9/10 4.6/5 Information Technology and Services
BrainShark NA Yes 8.9/10 4.4/5 Computer Software
Elucidat NA Yes 8.4/10 4.6/5 E-Learning
Instruqt NA NA 8.5/10 4.9/5 Computer Software
Flowsparks NA No 8.0/10 4.4/5 Human Resources

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