Why this Service?

Brandon Hall Research recently conducted research to assess the state of the e-learning industry. This research included an online survey and telephone interviews with chief learning officers (CLOs), key decision-makers, and thought leaders associated with training initiatives within some of the most important organizations in the world. In all, nearly 300 people contributed data to this research.

When asked whether they had one or two major strategic business initiatives presently supported by e-learning, 80.9 percent of respondents answered “Yes.”

When asked to describe the scenario that best describes their present e-learning practices, the answers were as follows:

These numbers suggest that many organizations have moved out of the start-up phase of e-learning, often characterized by buying one or two off-the-shelf courses and trying them out, and are now mature practitioners. As mature practitioners, nearly all those interviewed mentioned that they develop – or plan to develop – at least some e-learning content in-house. When asked, based on their experiences to date, would they plan to implement more, the same, or fewer e-learning initiatives in the future, 87.2 percent said “more.”

These statistics suggest that more e-learning content will be developed in 2005 than ever before. All this e-learning content will come in many forms, from static Web pages and Adobe Acrobat documents to the richest, most realistic simulations; from engaging games and scenarios to powerful assessments to measure what the student has learned.

The good news is that the tools presently available to create e-learning content have never been more powerful. Modern authoring tools produce e-learning content that is as varied in format as in function and appearance. E-learning authoring tools publish content in HTML, DHTML, XML and Java applets, as well as a large number of proprietary file formats requiring a browser plug-in. In addition, individual authoring tools can publish content in different formats for specific situations. This allows authors to author content for an environment that allows the use of browser plug-ins, or as generic HTML and JavaScript using the same tool.

Not only can modern authoring tools often publish content to many different formats, but increasingly, they are able to publish to many platforms. As the wireless and hand-held computer revolution continues, some authoring tools are able to output content to increasing powerful smart phones, pagers, and personal digital assistants such as Palm and Windows CE devices. For students with less of an interest in high-tech, many of these same tools can output their content to paper.

Our intent with this edition of research on authoring tools is to provide our readers with more detailed information about a greater number of authoring tool products than ever before. The 2001 printed edition of the "Authoring Tool Buyer’s Guide" featured 30 products and was just under 350 pages in length. Our 2004 printed edition was greatly expanded and featured 43 products and was 900 pages in length. Our Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase 2006 now covers 100 tools and consists of thousands of pages detailed, up-to-date information about the most useful tools available to create online training content.

To include as many products in our research as possible, we invited vendors to participate through multiple mailings to our 26,000+ newsletter subscribers as well as to the 500+ providers of tools and technology included in our Directory of E-Learning Providers. We also invited vendors through postings on discussion boards related to e-learning.

Based on our experience using, testing, and viewing demonstrations of authoring tools, we created a comprehensive online, database-driven questionnaire and gathered comparative analysis information on the products included in this report. Once the questionnaires were submitted back to us, the information was edited, formatted, and returned to the vendors for a final check to ensure the information was factually correct.

In Part II of this service, we provide advice to help you select the right authoring tools for your organization. We begin by examining situations when authoring your own content is appropriate – and when it isn’t.

We then present an overview of the types of authoring tools on the market. Although there are a large number of tools, many tend to use the same common interfaces – such as form-based input – to create content. We then provide tips to help you select the appropriate authoring tool for your organization.

Completing Part II of this service, we provide a checklist of authoring tool features. Use this checklist to help identify your most important requirements. You can then use this list to pinpoint the products that most closely meet your needs.

Part III contains success stories from organizations presently creating content in house.

Part IV of this online service provides thousands of pages of product profiles. Each profile provides a screen capture of the content developed with the tool, a screen capture of the interface the developer sees when creating content, and a screen capture illustrating a particularly engaging example of content created with this tool. Also included in the profiles are easy-to-read At-A-Glance charts that provide a quick summary of the product and vendor. Use the information in the At-A-Glance tables to quickly get a sense of what a product can do for you.

If the At-A-Glance table suggests this is a tool you should consider, the rest of the product profile will provide detailed descriptions of the product’s features. The product profiles cover the following topics:

• Product overview
• Company overview
• Learning curve
• The authoring environment
• Output formats
• Templates and rapid application development
• Simulations and games
• Testing and assessments
• Use of a learning object model
• Conformance to standards and specification
• Integration and interoperability
• Tracking and reporting
• Extensibility
• Language and localization capabilities
• Requirements
• Technical support
• Pricing
• Contact information

Part V of the Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase provides an Authoring Tool Comparison Tool to help you compare similar products side by side. Simply choose the products you would like to compare by selecting them from the list and clicking the "Compare" button.

Part VI of the Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase provides an Authoring Tool Selection Service. Select the features you require in an authoring tool and the application will display the products that meet your requirements.

Lastly, in the Appendix, we introduce the authors of this research service and provide a glossary of e-learning terms, as well as the contact information for all the companies included in this service.

It isn't necessary for you to read the material in this online service in the order presented in the table of contents. You can jump around and explore the content in the manner that best meets your needs. If you're new to purchasing authoring tools, you may wish to begin with Section II of this service. This section provides information you should consider before purchasing a product.
If you purchased access to this research to help find an authoring tool with specific features, you can jump directly to our Authoring Tool Selection Service. This application allows you to specify the features you need in a product. The KnowledgeBase will then return the names of the products that match your requirements.

If you have already narrowed your search to only a few similar products, jump ahead and use the Authoring Tool Comparison Service. Simply select products from a list to see how they compare for dozens of features side by side.

At the core of this research are the authoring tool profiles. Each profile contains an At-A-Glance chart to quickly give you a summary of a company's products, services, and characteristics. Deeper into the profile are descriptions and specifications, as well as a listing of the courses the vendor sells. Also contained are three screen captures to help you better visualize a vendor's product. Like all the pages in the Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase, you can print the product profiles on standard 8.5 x 11-inch paper from within your browser.

The scope of our research has grown significantly in the last few years. In some situations, our traditional model of providing static, downloadable, Adobe Acrobat PDF documents has many downsides. We feel that certain research topics might benefit from a migration to an online format. For example, for this particular research project on authoring tools, a downloadable PDF report would likely be in excess of 2,000 pages. Since we have included three screen captures of each product, the resulting Adobe Acrobat file(s) would be larger than 75 MB – even after being converted to PDF format and compressed as a downloadable zip file. Such large downloads can be difficult for customers who lack broadband connections. This is one reason we are migrating much of our research about products and services online.

More importantly, though, we believe an online service provides the ability to create research that is more useful and easier to use. At the core of this authoring tool research is a database containing detailed information about product. Many of the Web pages you will browse in this service are dynamically generated from the information contained in this database. Because the database is continually updated, the information you access in this service is always up to date.

A database-driven online service also allows us to provide you with online tools to make selecting an authoring tool much easier than if you were using a conventional, paper-based document. Our Authoring Tool Comparison Tool allows you to select multiple products to see how they compare for dozens of characteristics, including compliance with e-learning specifications, plug-in requirements, pricing, etc. Our Authoring Tool Selection Service allows you to quickly find a product that contains the features that meet your requirements.