You might already be aware that eLearning is becoming a mode of life for many academies as well as students. Instructors craft their own online learning courses for learners to enjoy, but with it, they also need a great authoring tool. 

An authoring tool is one of the most essential pieces of software in an e-learning toolkit. It allows users to create learning lessons, content, and curriculum using media, interactions, and text. eLearning authoring tools are typically pre-designed and provide a ready-to-use network complete with media, templates, tools, tests, and interactions that the authorities can easily manipulate and arrange. However, all authoring software can be classified into two categories: cloud-based authoring tools and desktop-based authoring tools. 

Even with different variations in functionality and features, picking a new e-learning authoring tool, it’s important to look after each feature objectively and rigorously. Nevertheless, here are a few features that authorize the work of the internal content creators and instructors to be handled more swiftly as well as making training sessions easier to disseminate and more scalable. 

Templates and Layouts

A consistent layout and template are very important in developing more than one curriculum for the same audience. And to dramatically increase productivity while creating e-learning courses, one needs to start from scratch and have predefined templates and layout software that is easy to use. However, these templates must have a background and custom theme for the entire course as well as have the ability to design custom templates and import external templates or themes. 

These templates let you add stability to your curriculum material design. With consistency in designs, the students pay more attention to the course content. The ability to import prebuilt templates from other systems is among some of the most demanding features in authoring tools such as Articulate 360. 

Collaboration

E-learning programs involve different people, which makes things challenging. But with the collaboration feature, one can get the best instructional content creators in the world to work on course content or help existing creators to equate with subject matter experts living in different cities. A collaboration-friendly authoring software offers more than designers a chance to work out of their local environment. However, an authoritative tool with collaboration features must entail co-features like author control, versioning, co-authoring, reviewing system with feedback, and more. 

Easy to use

 Modern software makes the learning process much easier, with resource management, made easy without requiring plenty of technical skills. It is necessary to make sure that every individual can take e-learning courses with ease of use. This also enables you to spend more time concentrating on your curriculum and less time discovering how to create material students can read. However, an authoring tool must have WCAG 2.0 Support, accessible font sizes, customized tab order, compliance with Section 508 accessibility guidelines, and more.

Multilingual 

A good curriculum always provides the learner variety to keep the engrossment and interest levels of students up. And, being able to translate the texts of a course to different languages with the proper tools brings optimization of time and effort. Some extensively used interaction varieties that feature in most of the authoring tools are flip cards, accordions, timelines, and process steps. Moreover, having a tool with a content translation system may also help you save thousands of dollars per year.  

Publishing 

Different companies have different publishing requirements when it comes to online learning courses. Some of the most recent publishing formats are flash, iOS, Android, CD, cloud-based, HTML, and more. And it is necessary to choose an authoring tool that is flexible with your organization’s LMS. 

However, an authoring tool plays an important role in the learning process from a completely unique end-to-end software to a system that blends smoothly with your available learning systems.