Does anyone know of a good Authoring Tool or LCMS which can be used for the rapid development of training materials (Printable Documents & Manuals, Simulations and E-Learning, etc...) and can be used by individuals without instructional design or programming experience?

I guess it's common sense that if you put garbage into any tool, you get garbage out (optically speaking) but there must be some Authoring Tools / LCMS out there which force the author to produce content in an optically attractive / consistent manner.

I have spent a while looking first at Authoring Tools alone, and then expanding the search to include LCMSs, but very few of them have:

- optically attractive pre-configured templates
- work off-line
- have a screen capture facility included (not just recording a "video", but that the screen capture can be edited to add callouts and interactions etc...)
- are easy to use for the author
- and doesn't require additional person hours to use the tool to manipulate the content via setting parameters

I previously piloted one Authoring Tool only to find out that the person hours needed for one author to create just 1 hour of E-Learning content were astronomical.

I have looked at Evolution, Lectora, etc... but pretty much all of them only do 50% of what I need, and are not at all easy to use.

If you want to email me I can give you some specific tools you may want to consider.. scase20@juno.com
steve

L&DLarry,

Adobe & Learn.com has some great authoring tools!

Good luck,

Karen R. Johnson
Training Manager

I'm not aware of an authoring tool that does everything you want. However, I can heartily recommend SnagIt for the screen capture part of things. It can also create Flash rollovers, and it's easy to use.

Also, Articulate provides some templates for their product that would at least provide a consistent look.

If you want to try an instructional design tool, you might be interested in joining the Elearning Blueprint beta test (a project of mine). The blueprint is a web site that walks you through the process of designing and writing lively elearning content. There's more info here: http://www.elearningblueprints.com

Cathy

I have not yet been able to find a single tool
that does everythig of this.

Usually there is tool package to do that.
You may have a look at this Rapid E-Learning Suite.
http://www.sameshow.com/e-learning-suite.html

The demo creation tool in this package makes
Flash-based screencasting which can be insertd to PowerPoint.
Then you can convert PowerPoint presentation to template-driven content.