Research Spotlight: Next Generation of Asynchronous Authoring Tools

In October 2013, The eLearning Guild published a comprehensive research report on asynchronous authoring tools. Now we present our 2017 report, which provides major updates on the impact of technologies notwidely used back in 2013, as well as functional requirements for authoring toolselection and additional features essential in today’s asynchronousauthoring environment. 

Guildmembers worldwide participated in an online survey that collected the dataanalyzed in this report. The survey launched on June 10, 2016, and closed onJuly 1, 2016. We received a total of 1,698 responses. Of this number, 1,178were fully qualified and complete surveys, while 520 were partial responses.

In publishingthis report, the Guild continues its commitment to better understanding wherethe 2017 asynchronous authoring tools market is going, what types of authoringtools are valued today, and what features are most desired by practitioners,managers, tool providers, and other stakeholders.

This new report was co-authored by Joe Ganci and SharonVipond, the Guild’s director of research. Ganci is president of eLearningJoe, a consulting and trainingeLearning company. He has been involved in every aspect of eLearningdevelopment since 1983 and has received numerous awards as an acclaimed expertin learning technologies and asynchronous authoring tools. He also writes themonthly “Toolkit” column in Learning Solutions Magazineand often speaks at Guild conferences.

Why you should readthis report

Buildingon our initial publication in 2013, we updated this report for a primaryaudience composed of learning practitioners, managers, and authoring toolvendors.

• Practitionersneed these research data to understand current trends in authoring tools.Because it is difficult to keep up with all the tools and technologies in thisfield, this report helps inform practitioners’ professional developmentactivities and selection of tools. Those already committed to a specific set oftools still need to understand where the field is heading so that they mayinfluence stakeholders on the direction of tools best suited to the needs oftheir organization.
• Managersneed to understand current trends in authoring tools in order to make decisionsabout tool usage in their own organizations. However, decision makers must rememberthat the best tool for another organization may not be the best tool fortheirs.
• Authoringtool vendors need and want to understand practitioner preferences in order toimprove quality and innovation of all asynchronous authoring tools in thefuture marketplace.

Let’s look atseveral key findings from the report. Be sure to read the entire researchreport for a wealth of additional data and practitioner insights, as well asbackground resources.

Skill level andexperience with primary authoring tool

In thefirst section of the report, our goal was to better understand thecharacteristics of practitioners who currently use authoring tools—inparticular, their primary interests in tools, their level of authoringexperience and skill, and the types of asynchronous eLearning content that theycreate.

Forexample, we asked: “How would you rate your skill level with your primaryauthoring tool?” As shown in Figure 1, the largest percentage of surveyrespondents (39.8%) rated themselves at an “intermediate” level. In otherwords, they knew how to use workarounds and “tips and tricks” specific to theirauthoring tool. They were also able to begin using their primary tool to createcomplex learning content.

Figure 1: Skill level with authoring tools. (Note: Total percentages shown in some of these diagrams may be higherthan 100% because of rounding.) 

Next, we asked what length of time respondents had been engagedin authoring or otherwise developing eLearning content (Figure 2). The largestgroup (20.4%) said they had been authoring or developing for 4 ­– 6 years. Twoslightly smaller groups (both at 16.3%) reported 7 – 9 years and, on the otherend of the scale, 1 – 3 years.

Perhaps most interesting was the large, combined group ofrespondents who have extensive experience in authoring or developing eLearning.This group, as a whole (total of 41.3%), had 10 years of experience or more.

Figure 2: Length of experience usingauthoring tools

Features, options, and capabilities that practitioners want

This is an important part of the research report because it providesa clear picture of the features, options, and capabilities that practitionersmost want in their asynchronous authoring tools in 2017 and beyond.

The results reported in this chapter are complex, detailed,and wide-ranging. We will preview only three of the important topics covered inthe report. These include discussions of:

• Preferences for power vs. ease of use
• Importance of authoring options
• Importance of publishing options, including thecritical role that responsive design plays in authoring tool characteristics

See the entire research report for detailed discussions of theseand other topics, as well as practitioner insights and guidance.

What would you choose: Power or ease of use?

In our 2013 authoring tool survey, we asked about “power vs.ease of use” for the first time. In other words, we asked respondents to choosebetween two options:

• Power—Wouldthey prefer a more powerful tool, one that is more difficult to learn butincludes many more features to make the instructional design approach as richand engaging as possible?
• Ease of use—Or,would they like to have the ability to do more with tools that are easy tolearn and use, even though these tools will normally have fewer features withwhich to apply an instructional design approach?

Authoring tool vendors may try to convince buyers that theirtool is both easy to use and very powerful. Of course, “ease of use” and “power”are relative terms. A tool’s ease of use and power can only be measured againstthe ease of use and power of other eLearning development tools. That beingsaid, most vendors are not actively attempting to identify what their competitionis including in its tools. That identification and analysis process would bevery time-consuming, considering the number of tools and how often they areupdated. As such, many tool vendors (though not all) convince themselves thattheir tool is really the best one available, as their whole experience iswrapped up in that tool.

In 2013, 58.8% of respondents said they’d rather have power,while 36.6% said they preferred ease of use and 4.6% could not decide.

In Figure 3, we can see that the percentage of those who preferpower has increased, at the expense of ease of use. Over 61% of surveyrespondents said, “Give me power,” while half that number (31.1%) said, “Makeit easy.” Over 7% said they did not know which one of the two options they morepreferred.

Figure 3: Authoring tool power vs.ease of use

Importance of authoring options

We also asked a series of questions to determine howimportant it was to our respondents that certain options are included in anauthoring tool. In order to rank these, we asked survey respondents to tell ushow important each option was to them, using a scale of 1 – 6 where 1 indicated“not important” and 6 indicated “very important.” Figure 4 shows the percentagerankings of the options we surveyed. The percentages shown from this point onrepresent those who rated the feature a 4 or higher.

We can see from the results (Figure 4) that while Windowscontinues to be the primary platform for authors (at 92.8%), about 44% ofrespondents indicate that the Macintosh platform is important to them, and eventhe Linux platform is desired by over 8% of respondents. Interestingly, whilerespondents also show high interest in cloud-based tools, perhaps more wouldhave indicated such if we had made it clear that most cloud-based tools can beaccessed from all three operating systems.

Figure 4: Importance of authoring options

A somewhat surprising result of this survey question is thatmore than half of respondents would like to be able to author directly onmobile devices. While we assume most respondents meant tablets and notsmartphones, it shows how far mobile has come.

Collaborative authoring, in which two or more authors canwork together on a lesson, typically using a check-in/check-out system, seemsto be highly desired, too (at 72.8%). Collaborative authoring is easiest toimplement in cloud-based tools, of course, as everyone can log in to the toolvendor’s website from anywhere in the world rather than trading files usingDropbox or another sharing mechanism.

Finally, this question also shows that a huge number of respondentswould like for instructional designers (92.7%), and even subject matter experts(55.3%), to be able to directly author lessons. Recall that in Figure 3, about62% of respondents preferred having more powerful tools while about 31%preferred easy-to-use tools. The results of this question show how difficult itcan be to keep our priorities consistent. We’d all like to have tools that areeasy enough that instructional designers and SMEs can author lessons directly,but we don’t want to give up the power that comes with many features. Havingmany features leads to complexity, and that leads to a tool that is harder touse. From our experience, most instructional designers and SMEs are notwilling, or simply don’t have the time, to learn the full feature set ofpowerful tools, which often requires a bit of a programmer mindset.

Therefore, it would be difficult for a tool vendor tosatisfy both the need for ease of use and the demand for power. Ideally, itseems many users agree that a tool should have two levels. The first would usea simple interface and might not have all the features present, and the secondwould allow those who need the powerful features to have access. The latterwon’t mind getting their hands dirty a little to truly customize theinstructional design to the learner and the content. Of course, there can bemore than two levels.

Importance of publishing options

Before learners can use the eLearning you create, mostauthoring tools require that you publish your lesson in one of several formatsthat will be suitable to upload or link to a learning management system, orsimply to post on a website. So, which options are important to you?

As publishing options reflect changes in the computer andweb world overall, this question takes on further meaning because the optionsshow what changes are occurring within the technical departments oforganizations (Figure 5). Therefore, we thought it would be interesting to seewhat has changed since 2013, when our last authoring tools report waspublished.

Figure 5: Importance of publishing options

Not surprisingly, Figure 5 also shows that there has been asignificant change in the responses regarding publishing to Flash vs. HTML5:

• In 2013, almost 62% indicated that publishing toFlash was highly or very highly important. That number now has dropped slightlyto 58.2%.
• On the other hand, the percentage of respondentswho indicated in 2013 that HTML5 and/or mobile publishing was highly or veryhighly important was already at 74.6% and is now at 94.8%.

It’s all about responsive design now

For this survey, we added a new topic that was just startingto become widely known in 2013: responsive web design. Responsive design allowsweb authors to create one set of files that will adapt themselves to displaycorrectly on any device. As this technology has grown in popularity (mostcommercial websites are now built this way) and the importance of deliveringlearning to mobile devices has increased tremendously, it has also becomeimportant for an eLearning authoring tool to include responsive designcapabilities.

Tool vendors are responding in kind, and several have begunto build this ability into their tools.

An amazing 95.2% of respondents have deemed responsivedesign important or very important, even though some respondents also ratedmobile output among the most important features in a tool. Tool vendors, takenote!

Comparing other changes:

• Publishing to PDF was considered important orvery important by 51.7% in 2013, and it shows how important the PDF formatremains today that that number has risen to 81.2%.
• It’s also clear that video continues to grow inimportance, with a jump from 57.5% to 88.3%, even though publishing to a videoformat means losing any interactivity in your lesson.
• Those who would like to be able to publish abeta version lesson, so that reviewers can add comments and such, has risenfrom 59.2% to 83.3%.
• The ability to publish to Microsoft Word–basedstoryboards has remained desirable and in fact has also risen, from 63.2% to73.8%.
• Finally, we also asked how many would like topublish lessons as YouTube videos. This means losing any interactivity in suchlessons. The percentage of respondents who find this important has increasedfrom 44.2% in 2013 to 63.1%.

Looking forward

Ourasynchronous authoring tool report focuses on the features, options,and capabilities that practitioners want in 2017 and into the future. Weprovide a micro-leveldiscussion of the specific features practitioners want from their authoringexperience. These options and features are examined from a variety ofperspectives, such as publishing options, global features common to all tools,and specialized features, which span a broad range of categories fromassessment to user community and support. This information should prove valuablein predicting which features, options, and capabilities will be included in thenext generation of tools.

Webelieve that the information included in this research report is essential for thecurrent learning landscape. Even more importantly, it will enable readers to betteranticipate which features, options, and capabilities may be included in thenext generation of asynchronous authoring tools.

Beginningthis year, the Guild will publish interim updates toour asynchronous authoring tool report and continue to monitor the rapidevolution of tools, technology, and practitioner interests in this criticalsubject area. We look forward to a similarly wide participation of Guildmembers and interested practitioners in this continuing research.