The Perfect eLearning Course Development Toolkit For The New Academic Year
You must be looking forward to beginning new projects after the summer break. A great eLearning professional knows that being up to date on the latest trends is key. Want to know what my favorite tools for creating eLearning courses are?
I hope this selection will help your training programs surpass all your expectations and be complete, entertaining, and very pedagogical!
Trello: Project Management
Trello is an essential Project Management tool for trainers working in teams. Accessible from any browser on both PC and mobile, Trello is used to organize projects, define phases, schedule tasks, assign persons in charge, and set delivery dates. With a 100% visual system based on Kanban techniques, it is very simple and intuitive to use.
Why it’s perfect for your eLearning courses: The individuals managing the projects (both large or small) need to have a global vision and know the current stage of each task, who is in charge, and when the task is expected to be completed and delivered. This is helpful when working with content experts, designers, educators, programmers, etc. to ensure that everything flows better, and you wind up with a great course. Trello is the perfect tool for this. It also comes with a large free package that you can use in your projects without affecting the cost.
Canva: Infographics Creation
All trainers understand the power of a good infographic. Unfortunately, we can’t always count on having a designer who specializes in them for our projects... or even a designer. That’s why Canva is the perfect tool for people with little design knowledge but a great desire to communicate visually.
Why it’s perfect for your eLearning courses: Canva offers you lots of design pre-sets to use, and not just for infographics. You can design material for social networks, presentations, marketing material, documents, and even eBooks, ensuring a consistent graphic line in all of your communications. What’s more, anyone can learn to use Canva, even if they’ve never used a design tool: its drag & drop-based functionality is very simple and intuitive.
Camtasia: Screen Recording
Camtasia is a screen recording tool that’s perfect for creating video tutorials or making online presentations where you need to share the computer screen live. It has two awesome features: first, the recorder, which lets you capture video and audio, and second, the editor, which works as a video editor.
Why it’s perfect for your eLearning courses: Camtasia is perfect for courses where you need to teach the use of a certain program or application, or even when you want to share eLearning courses with potential clients to teach them how certain functionalities are used. When editing videos, the tool lets you add points of interest so you get a video with interactive elements, turning any content into very motivating video for students. Your license is paid, but if video tutorials are your thing, we guarantee the investment will be worthwhile.
Animaker: Animated Video Creation
Video can be a great pedagogical tool, but often times our lack of knowledge about editing tools (or our limited budget) can limit the way we use them. Animaker is a tool that lets people with little animation knowledge create very professional-quality animated videos.
Why it’s perfect for your eLearning courses: Animaker gives you a large library of videos with design pre-sets, where all you need to do is customize the content to produce high-quality animated videos. The tool specializes in "explainer" animated videos, perfect for onboarding courses or explaining processes and services. In addition, you can work with "whiteboard" videos, which are very popular lately and use a hand to draw visual information on the screen. Animaker also places a large selection of animated characters, icons, and drawings entirely at your disposal. The tool has a great free program so you can try it out and amaze your students before deciding on a paid version with more features.
Unsplash: Image Bank
Unsplash is a free image bank with over half a million high-resolution, royalty-free images. More than 70,000 photographers from around the world upload their photographs onto Unsplash, which are then curated by a group of photo editors and tagged to make them easy to find using the search engine on the website. Unsplash is doing a great job of tagging the images, since – in addition to tagging them in multiple languages – tags are created not only based on their literal content but also on their figurative meaning (for example, "teamwork" or "strength" produces lots of interesting image results).
Why it’s perfect for your eLearning courses: With Unsplash, the never-ending search for high-quality images is over. Its huge catalog is adapted to all kinds of industries and businesses, so you can always find images to fit the design of your courses. The fact that the images are royalty-free will save you from all kinds of copyright issues. And because they’re free, you’ll save money on your courses.
isEazy: Authoring Tool
Gone are the days when producing an eLearning course was reserved for specialized programmers. The isEazy authoring tool lets anyone with basic computer knowledge to create beautiful, interactive, and highly pedagogical eLearning courses.
With isEazy, you can design courses very easily using its "quadrant" system, so you can add text, images, multimedia content or interactive content to each one. isEazy is also integrated with platforms like Youtube, Vimeo, Slideshare, Google Docs, Kaltura, iVoox, and Genially, so it’s really easy to complete your courses with external video content, presentations, podcasts, etc.
Why it’s perfect for your eLearning courses: In these fast-moving times, it’s important to be able to adapt quickly to trends and update your courses constantly; isEazy makes this possible. It makes customization and updating so easy that you don't need to beproject an expert to manage the tool. It also has a great free package that lets you try out the tool free of charge.
Which eLearning tools would you recommend?
You must have some on your list of essentials. If you think there are others that deserve to be added to the list, let us know in the comments!