eLearning Guild Research: What Authoring Tool Features Are Important to You?

If you’re anything like the vast majority of The Guildcommunity, you’re interested in authoring tools (I sure am!). When we askedsurvey respondents for the 2013 Authoring Tools research report to tell us why asynchronous authoring tools are important tothem, the vast majority (84.4%) of the 1,055 respondents said they useauthoring tools to create eLearning, and 35.3% said they teach others how touse the tools. Over a quarter of the respondents manage people who useauthoring tools.

Figure 1 shows that of those that use authoring tools, 45.9%consider themselves to be advanced beginners to intermediate-level developersand 49.2% consider themselves to be advanced to expert developers, a fairlyeven split.

Figure 1: Skill levelwith authoring

Last month I discussed what The 2013 Authoring Toolsresearch report said were respondents’ mostused asynchronous eLearning authoring tools, their most important asynchronous eLearning authoring tool, and oneasynchronous eLearning authoring tool they’ve considered buying. Wealso discussed this report at DevLearn 2013 last month, where the audience feltthat some of the information in that area of the report was surprising,especially since the lineup of favorite tools has changed since our last reporta few years ago. But that’s the exciting thing about the Guild’s tools-researchreports, things do tend to move around over time!

This month I’d like to discuss the last half of the report,an in-depth analysis of respondents’ view of the importance of individual asynchronouseLearning authoring tool features.

We knew that respondents considered the most importantaspect of an asynchronous eLearning authoring tool to be its features. So wewanted to ask respondents about the importance of specific authoring toolfeatures. Realizing that there could be differences between different kinds ofdevelopers, we started first with a question about the importance of power orease of use (Figure 2). Because Figure 1 showed a split on skill level, youmight expect a real split on this question.

We intentionally set the question up as a dichotomy to forcerespondents to choose. Contrary to what you might expect, many more chose power,instead of ease of use.

Figure 2: Importanceof power versus ease of use

We asked a lot ofquestions in this section about many different types of authoring features (assessments,branching, audio, video, templates, community, progress tracking, etc.). Ipicked out one feature to share with you.

All assessment micro-features rated as important

Respondents who said that assessment features were importantin an asynchronous eLearning authoring tool were asked to rate the featuresshown in Figure 3. All of the features received a high or very high rating from50% or more of the respondents, which isn’t surprising, as assessments are relativelyimportant in asynchronous eLearning.

Below are the ratings of each of the assessmentmicro-features in order of score. (Ratings are the percentage of people whorated the micro-feature high or very high.)

1. Canchoose from wide variety of question types (including multiple choice, fill-in,and hot spot) (94.7%)
2. Canrequire questions to be answered (93.6%)
3. Canshow review of question after score (92.2%)
4. Canformat question pages as desired (91.1%)
5. Cantrack assessments (90.3%)
6. Cancreate randomized questions (84.4%)
7. Cancreate global quiz preferences (83.7%)
8. Canshuffle answers (83.0%)
9. Canadd media to questions (82.6%)
10. Canrandomize questions from banks or pools (80.6%)
11. Cancreate pretests where results drive course navigation (76.3%)
12. Canshow references (such as electronic references) to be used with questions(77.2%)

Figure 3: How respondents rated assessment features inasynchronous eLearning authoring tools

Important features overall: top five

At the end of all of the features sections, I was able todetermine what respondents felt were the mostimportant features overall by rating percentage and I listed the top-20features. I’ll list the top-five features for you here.

1. Cancustomize how interactions look and feel (95.2%)
2. Canuse numerous text-formatting options (styles, bullets, justification, etc.)(95.2%)
3. Canchoose from a wide variety of question types (including multiple choice, fill-in,and hot spot)  (94.7%)
4. Canmake objects on the screen interactive (93.8%)
5. Canrequire questions to be answered (93.6%)

What do you think of these top five features? One thing wasobvious in looking at the Top 20: instructional quality and interactivity were quiteimportant to respondents. Great news!

There’sa lot of important information in this report for practitioners, managers, andvendors. With so many developers and authoring trainers responding, this data isreally quite valuable. Get your hands on a copy of this report so you can useit to make good decisions about authoring. Thanks to all the people whoresponded to this (and other) surveys, making this kind of quality dataavailable to our community!