Podcast news

Next Wednesday, 21st May - Doing E-learning will be bringing you our Rapid e-learning '101' podcast.

Very timely as two days later the eLearning Network is hosting a live debate on the subject - Rapid e-learning: dumbing down or gearing up?

Don't forget to subscribe so that you get each one as it comes!

STOP PRESS: e-learning tools!

It seems to have been a hectic few weeks in the e-learning tools market, not least in 'rapid' tools.

Many of the established names have either been releasing newer versions of their tools, or promising new releases later in the year - as well as a few new entrants to the market, with none other than Microsoft making a sneaky appearance!

Raptivity 5.0 has been talking up its 'rich text formatting options'. Atlantic Link released news on how courses can now be developed directly to the native screen sizes for the Sony PSP Slim & Lite. RapideL-i announced a 'host of new features' and a total of 100 templates!

Adobe continues to grow its e-learning offering with its updated Acrobat Connect Pro 7 - due at the end of this month - which will be pushed as a 'large-scale web conferencing tool'. And Webtora is coming out in Q4 2008 - basically a 'Web 2.0' version of Lectora, allowing collaboration among content authors.

And all of the above without mentioning Microsoft's truly 'soft' launch of its *FREE* Learning Content Development System (LCDS), which appeared at the backend of April.

As part of a recent project, one of us here at Doing E-learning had to trial a vast number of the 'rapid tools'. The market is a huge battleground at the moment, with a vast number of them out there adding and improving what's on offer in a series of head to heads - and that can only be good.