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.

Microsoft + e-learning + free = good news?

Since the latter half of April, Microsoft's venture into the e-learning tools market has been upon us.

Over the past few weeks there's been the odd post here and there mentioning Microsoft's recently launched Learning Content Development System (LCDS) (download the 44Mb file for free if you want). But talk about it has only slowly been building momentum.


Like the 'rapid e-learning' tools currently out there it's got a template approach, and outputs SCORM 1.2 compliant material. We've downloaded it at Doing E-learning and have it on our computers, but as yet haven't found the time to check it out!

Hopefully Kineo will soon add this one to their review list and we'll all be the wiser with minimal effort!