Tag: content creators toolkit

In this final part, we look at tools for special occasions:

Creating animations

There is nothing trivial about creating animations and this is usually a job for specialists. Those who don’t count themselves in this category can still produce quite decent results in PowerPoint, but this will only be of benefit if you are going to deliver your end product in PowerPoint or you are working with an authoring tool that will convert your work – including the animations – into Flash. Specialist animators will almost certainly choose to work with Adobe’s Flash Professional software, which is designed specifically for the job. As the name implies, this outputs to Flash, which means you can use the animations in most authoring tools and embed them directly in web pages.

Video editing

If video is part of your mix then, at very least, you’ll need the ability to import all your video clips into a project, select the ones you want to use, trim them and place them in sequence. You may also want to add music or a voiceover, superimpose captions, and apply effects or transitions. Luckily, all of this can be accomplished quite easily with low-cost or free tools such as Windows Live Movie Maker or Apple’s iMovie, as well as the budget versions of professional tools such as Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro. Like audio, video is surprisingly easy to work with and it should not take more than an hour or two to become familiar with all the most common operations.

Desktop publishing

Desktop publishing tools are normally used to lay out high-quality print publications such as brochures, newspapers, magazines, books and reports, but these days you’ll probably want to make this content available online as well as in print, almost certainly in PDF format. If so, although you can get by with standard word processing tools, you will almost always get much more professional-looking results with a specialist desktop publishing package, such as Adobe InDesign, Quark Express or Microsoft Publisher. Where these score over normal word processing packages is the compete flexibility you have over how you lay out text and graphics on each page. Look at a typical magazine and compare it with a typical Word document and you’ll soon see the difference.
We could go on. There are tools for creating cartoon books and for building 3D models; tools for developing games and for capturing screens from software packages. Some tools you will use every day, some just once. But to get started you certainly do not need them all. Kit yourself out with the basics and add to your collection as your skills and your creativity grow over time.
Part 1 Part 2
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, January 2012

If you’re looking to develop interactive learning materials then you’ll need to find an authoring tool that suits your purpose. It’s important to take some care in choosing this tool or you could easily find yourself with all sorts of frustrations and a lot of wasted effort. Your tool will have to meet all of the following criteria:

It has the functionality required for you to produce the type of content you need

You might expect this to be a given, but in fact different tools tend to be geared to different types of content. While some tools, such as Adobe Captivate, Lectora and Articulate Studio, are relative all-rounders, some are more specialist. For example, Camtasia is a great tool for producing screencasts, Caspian Learning’s Thinking Worlds lets you develop immersive, 3D learning environments, and the new Articulate Storyline is geared to the development of learning scenarios. There are many other tools to choose from, all with their particular strengths.

It works the way you want to work

Most of the tools mentioned above are desktop applications, licensed for use on individual computers and these are by far the most commonly used. However, other tools, such as Rapid Intake’s Unison and Edvantage’s CourseBuilder, that run online in the cloud, are geared towards a team approach to authoring. These are more likely to be licensed on an enterprise-wide basis, so that all members of a content development team, from project managers to designers, subject experts to graphics specialists, can work together collaboratively.
With an online authoring tool, all project data is stored in a central database, accessible from any web browser on any device; components, from images to complete learning modules, can be easily shared between projects; reviews and tests can be conducted online and comments stored alongside the content for auctioning by other members of the team; versions for different devices and languages can be exported from the same core material. You can expect to see a wide range of new online authoring tools appearing in the coming years, as more and more of our computing switches to the cloud. For large teams working on building substantial content libraries, the benefits will be obvious.

It has legs

There is nothing more frustrating than having to re-develop a whole load of material because the tool you used to originally develop the content is no longer supported or available. If you go out on a limb and purchase an esoteric tool from a little-known vendor, you are taking a real risk. That risk is even greater if you’re working in the cloud: at least with a desktop tool, you can still make changes because the app and your data are sitting there on your computer; when an online tool is closed down, your work vanishes without trace. There is no kudos to be gained by using the same tools as everyone else, but you will sleep better.

It outputs in the right formats for you

Before choosing a tool, you need to be aware of all of the devices that might be used to access your content and the formats that are supported on these devices. If your tool outputs in Flash and this is not supported on your users’ PCs, or you want to deliver on iPhones and iPads, then you’ve got the wrong tool.
Part 1
Coming in part 3: Tools for special occasions
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, January 2012

Every content creator has the task of assembling their toolkit, the software applications they need to support them in their work. The composition of your particular toolkit will depend on the roles you are expected to play in your team. Are you primarily responsible for design, or are you expected to take projects forward into development? Is yours a specialist role or do you get involved in just about everything? Whatever contribution you will be making, this guide will give you an idea of the tools you’ll need. What you end up with, however, may ultimately depend on your negotiations with your boss, your IT department or your bank manager.
Here are basic tools that everyone needs:

Office suite

It’s hard to imagine that you could get by very long as a content creator without a suite of office applications. The most essential element of this is going to be a Microsoft Word-compatible word processor. Even if you do most of your own writing online or in some other application, you’re almost bound to get material sent to you in Word’s .doc or .docx formats. If you don’t want to pay for the Microsoft suite, Mac and iPad users have the option of Apple’s iWork apps, and there’s always the free OpenOffice.
If you are going to be creating slide-based material, then you must have PowerPoint. You can produce e-learning materials in PowerPoint alone, but more likely you will be using an add-in, like Articulate Presenter, that converts your work into a more web-compatible format like Flash or, looking to the future, HTML 5. Be careful, because these add-ins only work in PowerPoint itself, not compatible programs, and then only on Windows, not Mac. A bonus is that, if your content development is going to centre on PowerPoint, you may not need a separate image editor. Recent versions of PowerPoint (2007 on) have fantastic imaging capabilities that may mean you’ll never need to work with another program.

Image editing

Assuming, like most content creators, that your work will extend beyond PowerPoint, then you will definitely need some basic image processing capability. Let’s start with photo editing. You must be able to crop, resize, flip and rotate, adjust exposure, white balance, tone and colour, as well as remove red-eye. A little more functionality can also come in handy, like isolating a figure from its background, correcting blemishes, creating photo montages, adding frames and shadows, and superimposing text.
There is only one professional choice for photo editing and that’s Adobe Photoshop, although Adobe’s much cheaper consumer offering, Photoshop Elements, has almost as much capability. If you have no serious graphic design pretensions, then almost any other photo editing tool will do everything you need. There are plenty of free tools, including Windows Live Photo Gallery and iPhoto for the Mac and iPad, as well as open source options such as Gimp.
Of course your graphical work is unlikely to be restricted to photos. Most photo imaging tools, including Photoshop, also have excellent capabilities for producing diagrams and charts, as does PowerPoint. Serious illustrators have their own specialist tool in Adobe Illustrator and web designers laying out interfaces and creating icons are likely to turn to Adobe Fireworks, but if you just need to dabble from time to time there’s absolutely no need to spend any serious money.

Audio editing

It’s possible that audio plays no part currently in your content plans, perhaps because you have severe bandwidth limitations, but without doubt that will change over the next few years. Audio editing might seem complex, with all those intimidating-looking waveforms to manipulate, but in practice it’s no harder than working with text. You need a tool that will allow you to record audio from a microphone, edit this audio to remove bad takes and hesitations, adjust and equalise the volume and then save to a variety of different file formats. Any audio editor will do this, including those built in to many authoring tools.
It is possible you’ll want to go further than just capture a single voice. You may want to record from several different microphones at the same time; perhaps mix in music and sound effects; maybe even record and mix your own music. In these cases you will need a dedicated audio editor. The free option is Audacity and this is a very capable tool. Professionals and enthusiasts will undoubtedly want to go further and use a tool like Steinberg’s Wavelab, Sony’s Sound Forge or Adobe Audition.
Coming in part 2: E-learning authoring tools
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, January 2012