There are a lot of tools we can use to create online learning. Everything from MS Word through to Articulate's range of products. What I have at the following link is a ranking of tools by satisfaction. http://elearningtech.pbworks.com/ToolSatisfaction These charts group tools into authoring, rapid elearning and simulation and include another chart of how many people responded, suggesting usage rates for the tool.

I was disappointed to see my personal favourite ToolBook languishing at the bottom of the satisfaction stakes and the reality is that this tool's day has probably come and it needs a total rewrite to encapsulate where elearning has evolved to. I would guess that most ToolBook authors wouldn't know or use openscript if their life depended on it. Another favourite from the early days was Authorware that sadly too has gone the way of the dinosaur...

I was pleased to see both Techsmith's camtasia, snagit and Adobe's captivate up there. Adobe Connect even got a reasonable rating and I wonder if that is because of Adobe Presenter as it is really a collaborative, video conferencing and presentation tool rather than being an authoring tool.

The Articulate range of products rated consistently highest across the groupings and I think that we need to evaluate the articulate range against the Adobe range in a K-12 context for rapid eLearning development.

Having said that I was pleased to see that PowerPoint and KeyNote for the Apple folk rated very well and the usage numbers suggest that the rapid authoring paradigm of storyboarding and preparing content in PowerPoint which is then "eLearning-ised and SCORM-ised" by the Articulate, Adobe and TechSmith products for injection into a Learning Management System like Moodle seems to be the standard asynchronous content development workflow.

For the record we use PowerPoint, Captivate, Presenter, Adobe Connect, Camtasia Studio and Snagit. There is some minimal usage of LAMS and hot potatoes. With education pricing on the Adobe products being competitive, more teachers are embracing them. Interestingly, the convergence of Microsoft Office and SharePoint workflows also means that reference documents stored in SharePoint wikis and document libraries can be included as reference content in a Moodle course with quizzes created in the authoring tool (say captivate) and uploaded into the Moodle LMS as a SCORM object that can be reported against in the gradebook.

This means that the wiki can be used simply as a reference wiki or for the user attending the Moodle delivered module, they get the content sequenced with formative assessments delivered at the end of each module. One set of content, two unique usages.

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