Career Mantra’s Official Blog

Over the last months we’ve been pay­ing closer atten­tion to e-Learing con­tent cre­ation tech­niques and con­tent author­ing tools and have tried to under­stand how each of these tools work and how they can ben­e­fit other learn­ing con­tent cre­ators. Such techniques/tools are often hard to find much less the method­ol­ogy to use them. It would worth explor­ing all these tools in detail. Career Mantra team will cover these in a series of posts.

In these series of arti­cles will help you to under­stand  the top e-learning author­ing tools that can be use­ful for your upcom­ing courses. There are many soft wares that can help you to weave learn­ing con­tent  faster and effec­tively.

First, let us look at the glos­sary of some e-learning terms; their def­i­n­i­tions and descrip­tions.

Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tem(LMS)

Learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tem is an appli­ca­tion used to plan, imple­ment and assess learn­ing processes related to online and offline train­ing, admin­is­tra­tion and per­for­mance man­age­ment.

LMS pro­vides a teacher, trainer or instruc­tor a means by which s/he can cre­ate con­tent, deliver con­tent, mon­i­tor learn­ers’ par­tic­i­pa­tion, and assess stu­dent per­for­mance. LMS also pro­vide learn­ers with inter­ac­tive fea­tures, such as inter­nal mes­sag­ing, video con­fer­enc­ing , event/calendar man­age­ment , dis­cus­sion forums, and other meth­ods of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

In gen­eral LMS has its own online con­tent author­ing tool as part of the over­all sys­tem. There are many con­tent author­ing tools in the market.Although they call them­selves Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tem they are  really just front end author­ing tools with lit­tle or almost no LMS func­tion­al­i­ties.  So the bot­tom line here is that a good Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tem should be able to deliver the con­tent cre­ated using any con­tent  author­ing tool.

Con­tent Author­ing Tool

A con­tent author­ing tool is a soft­ware appli­ca­tion used to cre­ate a rich learn­ing con­tent typ­i­cally for deliv­ery on the World Wide Web. Con­tent author­ing tools may also cre­ate con­tent in other file for­mats so that con­tent can be deliv­ered on a CD or in other for­mats for var­i­ous uses.The pack­age of con­tent author­ing tools include HTML, Flash, and other types of e-Learning author­ing libraries.

Course Author­ing Tool

A course author­ing tool is sim­i­lar to con­tent author­ing tool. The only dif­fer­ence in course author­ing tool is that it can cre­ate a com­plete  course pack­age while con­tent author­ing tools cre­ate sub­ject spe­cific online con­tent. Sub­ject spe­cific online con­tent  has less fea­tures and func­tion­al­ity than  online course. Of course this also depends on the soft­ware used to cre­ate the con­tent.

SCORM/AICC com­pli­ant

SCORM is an acronym for Sharable Course­ware Object Ref­er­ence Model , which is a set of spec­i­fi­ca­tions , when applied to course con­tent, pro­duces small, reusable eLearn­ing objects. A result of the US Depart­ment of Defense’s Advanced Dis­trib­uted Learn­ing (ADL) ini­tia­tive, SCORM-compliant course­ware ele­ments are eas­ily merged with other com­pli­ant ele­ments to pro­duce a highly mod­u­lar set of train­ing courses.

AICC stands for the Avi­a­tion Indus­try CBT [Computer-Based Train­ing] Com­mit­tee, which is an inter­na­tional asso­ci­a­tion of technology-based train­ing pro­fes­sion­als that develop train­ing guide­lines for the e-Learning indus­try. They are very few e-Learning content-authoring tools that are fully SCORM/AICC com­pli­ant.  The point to be noted is , as long as the content-authoring tool is SCORM/AICC com­pli­ant (cre­ates SCORM/AICC com­pli­ant courses) and the Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tem is SCORM/AICC com­pli­ant (works with SCORM/AICC courses), they always  work together seam­lessly.

In next part of the series we will take a closer look at the fac­tors to be con­sid­ered while choos­ing the con­tent author­ing tools.