Top 7 Free eLearning Authoring Tools
Are you looking for a free authoring tool that will let you create eLearning courses? You’ve probably almost given up on finding a decent solution with no hidden costs or time limits. But here’s some good news! We’ve done some deep research and tested seven authoring tools that cost nothing. Read on to learn which eLearning freeware are available and their strengths and weaknesses.
1. iSpring Free
iSpring Free is a userfriendly authoring tool for creating slide-based courses with quizzes. If you have ready-made presentations, you can turn them into interactive online courses in a few clicks as the tool builds right in PowerPoint. When converting, it maintains all PPT animations, triggers, and transitions intact.
Since the interface is familiar and intuitive, it’s also easy to build courses from scratch: just populate slides with texts, images, YouTube videos, and web objects — a page from Wikipedia or your corporate website, for example. There are three types of quiz questions for assessing learners’ knowledge: multiple-choice, multiple-response, and short answer. To enhance your quizzes, you can set feedback, number of attempts, and time limits.
The content created with iSpring Free automatically adapts to all devices and looks great on any screen, including those of PCs, Macs, tablets, and smartphones.
2. Udutu
Udutu is a free web-based tool for building courses. It comes with a variety of WYSIWYG apps that let you create different kinds of activities, including assessments, interactive modules, and branching scenarios. Like iSpring Free, it allows you to convert your PowerPoint slides to online courses, but this option requires a subscription of $10 per month. Courses can be downloaded to your computer as SCORM packages. The tool also enables you to upload previously authored SCORMs and reedit them.
Unlike many other authoring tools, Udutu offers a real-time collaboration option — it can be used by multiple people at different locations. However, the free membership allows you to distribute a link to a course only with watermarks placed on each slide.
3. IsEazy
isEazy is another cloud-based authoring tool. It has a user-friendly interface, so authors don’t need to invest their time in training. The free pricing plan, as well as the paid plans, allows you to build slide-based courses by using ready-made templates that you can populate with texts, images, videos, and audio. The tool also enables you to add and customize interactive elements — you can create interactive quizzes, timelines, catalogs, process interactions, and more.
But despite quite a rich feature set and ease of use, the isEazy free version has significant limitations. The tool restricts its use to 3 eLearning projects and puts a 0.3 GB limit on the space for courses. To remove these limitations and get access to more advanced authoring options, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.
4. Adapt
Adapt is an open-source tool that is designed for rapid course authoring. It stands distinctly apart from other content developing tools that have evolved from a ‘PowerPoint’ format design. Courses built with Adapt provide a webpage-like experience — they scroll vertically, not flipped like slides. The authoring tool doesn’t support branching scenarios and offers a very limited animation scope, so it is suited only to those who want to create long read courses with ‘linear navigation.’
Overall, the core functionality is sufficient to make simple online courses, but you can enhance the learner experience by installing additional Adapt plug-ins that will allow you to custom design your content. However, you need to have a techie mind to make some plug-ins work. Besides, it’s quite challenging for a non-technical person to install Adapt, as it requires the user to manually install and set up tools including Git, Node.js, and MongoDB, and take steps that are usually hidden within a packaged installer.
5. CourseLab
CourseLab version 2.4 is another free authoring software for building interactive eLearning courses that can be published to the web or an LMS. Like many other tools, it allows you to create the content in the WYSIWYG model, which means ‘what you see is what you get.’ However, the interface looks a bit outdated and is not very intuitive, so CourseLab can seem quite complicated to use for non-technical users and developers.
For tech geeks, this tool can be a good solution, since it provides quite an extensive feature set. You can make slide-based courses with images, videos, complex multi-object interactions, and quizzes. CourseLab comes with a large set of ready-to-use eLearning module templates, though learning how to use and customize them may require quite a lot of time.
6. GLOMaker
GLOMaker 3.0 is a free open-source tool that enables you to create structured interactive learning materials. It divides the process of authoring into two parts: planning and designing. Planner is the part where storyline learning design is created — GloMaker has two inbuilt design patterns that are rooted in pedagogic principles, but you can also use ‘freestyle’ mode to create your own design. The tool offers instructional design guidance for using and setting up each block. The designer part is where slides are developed. There are a variety of templates that can be customized according to your training needs.
GLOMaker provides a great number of options, including quizzes (multiple-choice / word assembly) with feedback, slide-show viewer, photo display with zoom facility, video and audio players, and more. However, many novice course builders will find the tool unintuitive and complicated to use.
7. H5P
H5P is an open-source cloud-based tool that allows you to create HTML5 eLearning content and publish it on popular platforms like WordPress, Moodle, or Drupal. The content can also be added to any LMS that supports LTI integration.
H5P is modular, there are a lot of content types and applications available for use with no technical skills needed. These include interactive videos, HTML5 presentations, branching scenarios, quizzes, flashcards, and more. However, the tool is quite limited as far as creating complex and customized eLearning projects. But if you’re an experienced course developer with coding skills, you’ll have good potential for building customized content.
All of these tools can help you create simple eLearning courses at no cost. However, if the basic features are not enough for your authoring ambitions, test-drive a full-featured authoring toolkit that will allow you to build professional eLearning courses with quizzes, video tutorials, dialog simulations, and interactive modules. You can use it free for 14 days.
Create online courses and assessments in record time.
Originally published at https://www.ispringsolutions.com/blog/free-elearning-authoring-tools?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=free_elearning_authoring_tools on May 18, 2020.
Want to up your digital learning expertise? Stay tuned with our latest eLearning tips and tricks. Subscribe to our newsletter!
