When putting together your eLearning, you can use L&D content tools on the cheap!
The eLearning Guild has surveyed some of its members and come up with a fairly comprehensive list of L&D content tools on the cheap.
Let’s start with collaboration and project management software. One of the most popular—and cheapest ways– to collaborate on shared documents is Google Docs. By giving access to your co-creators, you can work on the same document which is stored on Google Drive rather than emailing back and forth and often sacrificing quality. Google Docs allows tighter version control. Another collaborative program is Wrike, a cloud-based collaboration and project management software package. The company also has programs for creative and marketing team collaboration. Slack is also cited as a preferred collaboration tool and features a social media functionality for sharing ideas.
As for keeping track of your project, Trello gets high marks and is easy to use. The Trello workspace creates virtual note cards for every step of your project that can be dragged and dropped to change time lines.
When it comes to virtual meetings, Zoom gets a thumbs up because up to 100 participants can meet for up to 40 minutes and it allows unlimited one-on-one meetings. Another favourite is GoTo Meeting, which is useful if demoing a product or service because of its video sharing capability.
Other collaborative tools cited by the survey include: Skype, Dropbox (document and photo sharing), and Coursetune, a curriculum design program.
The Guild also identified Camtasia, a software suite used to create video tutorials and presentations directly from your screen or a plug-in to Microsoft PowerPoint. To create banners and animations HTML5Maker gets favourable reviews. When it comes to multi-track audio editing, Audacity is the go-to freebie.
When it comes to testing and prototyping your eLearning, Keynote and PowerPoint receive high praise from Guild members who participated in the Twitter chat about L&D tools that won’t break the budget.
If you are looking around for digging deeper into technology and development resources, Zeef , a Dutch-based curated site that covers everything from UX design to data science is an excellent stop in your search.
With such a bewildering around of L&D tools to choose from, you can use this article as your first port of call or contact My Learning Space to help guide you.