Are there any other options to develop eLearning modules?
As the topic of innovation keeps coming up from our clients and our prospect clients, we are wondering if authoring tools like Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate are now enough to fulfill our clients requirements.
On one hand, we acknowledge that this authoring tools help us a great deal for most of the eLearning requirements we face day to day, such as transitions, simple animations, click and reveals, quizzing, etc., and also they are very useful for reporting to the LMS different kind of data, allowing to wrap in SCORM the final eLearning modules.
However, when our clients request more advance functionality, we often have to make use of other software or find unorthodox solutions, for example, we recently received a request from one of our clients to use a more motion graphics approach to the eLearning module. Like I stated before, eLearning authoring tools are great for most things, but probably not enough to help us in this tasks, given that they lack animation functionality, like keyframe animation (which provides a more flexible control over how things appear, move and transform on screen), masks, blend modes, etc.
To solve this, we needed to make use Adobe After Effects, which is tailored toward these more complex animation tasks (and so much more!), but there is always this concern that files from this type of software won’t be LMS compliant. Since a tool like AE wasn’t intended to be used for eLearning purposes, by themselves the files exported from this software won’t be able to be directly integrated on an LMS (Although it really depends on the LMS, like Moodle, that accepts video files), there are some extra steps that need to take place to fully integrate it into an LMS.
For example, if you would like to add questions or have more of an interactive video, you then need to either import the videos into eLearning authoring tools, or custom code the SCORM wrapper. This also applies to things produced by other software, like game engines or even Camtasia.
In our experience, these extra steps are always worth exploring, since this will definitely open the doors to more engaging, interactive (and probably immersive, if we think of VR) ways to distribute training content.
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