I've been an academic educator and corporate trainer, but I'd like to move into instructional design.

Have been reading about some of the Adobe products, CS3, Captivate, On-Demand, Flash, Lectora, and SCORM and would like to pose this question:

Which of these software applications would you put the effort and resources into learning to use? "Look at what employers are asking for in vacancies" is what I've been doing, but if you had to limit your efforts and resources to some of the better and most industry-valuable applications, which would you focus on?

Thanks!

Instructional design and the programs you listed are two different balls of wax... related when it comes to e-learning, but still different.

Begin with instructional design. The programs are part of one possible delivery medium, and are not something you should even concern yourself with if you're just now stepping into instructional design for the first time. Even if ISD isn't new to you - you don't begin using these programs until after you've laid out a sound design and determined appropriate mode(s) of delivery.

Best of luck to you.

I agree that the first place to start is with some research in sound instructional design principles. There are lots of great books on the subject.

If you want to focus specifically on elearning, then I recommend you get familiar with the work of Ruth Clark (really guys, she doesn't pay me to endorse her work.... I just really like her books) and Bill & Kit Horton (www.horton.com). Clark's book Elearning And The Science Of Instruction is terrific. Horton has a book, but I haven't read it. I did take one of his classes, and it was very informative.

Regarding tools the most popular right now are Adobe Captivate, Adobe Presenter and Articulate Presenter Pro (www.articulate.com) for rapid eLearning and Adobe Flash and Dreamweaver for the real hard-core stuff (Flash is very robust, but takes forever to design in). There are a lot of companies that use Lectora, but I don't know much about it.

SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) and AICC (Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee)are not software packages. They are elearning industry standards that enable content produced in one of the software packages to communicate with a hosting service such as a LMS (Learning Management System).

Have you visited the eLearning Guild website? If you are really interested, sign up there.

Agreed on the other posts.

When you do get to software, I would start with Articulate, since it's Powerpoint-based, then Lectora because it's easy to use and popular, thus there is a job market for it. Flash is more powerful but also has a steeper learning curve.

Good luck to you.

Sheldon Murphy
Solid State Learning
www.sslearn.com

We had purchased Lectora and found it to be to difficult to use, especially when utilizing narration. We have since been used Captivate 2 and found it is much easier to use. We now use Swish, which is Flash based and allows us much flexibility to build eLearning (courses and simulations/with avatars) efficiently and greatly compresses file size.