Will HTML be replaced by a new technology?
Today’s reading is about elearning authoring tools. It’s a bit of murky territory and I’m trying to set the criteria to limit my reading and tools under consideration. For example, the learning guild produced a report about the top tools learning and development professionals use in their work (2021). Many of the usual suspects are there including Storyline (Articulate), Captivate (Adobe), and even H5P(!). Their list also included Vyond and Powtoon (animation/video softwares).
This is where I’m finding things a bit tricky. I’m trying to distinguish between tools used by professionals to make elearning and elearning authoring tools. For example, would you consider a vector graphics editor (e.g. Illustrator, Affinity Design, etc.) to be an elearning authoring tool? eLearning designers might use that software to create an elearning product, but is the vector graphics tool itself an elearning authoring tool?
For the purposes of my searches I’d say it is related – for the above stated reasons – but would exclude it from consideration. A tool like Captivate, iSpring, or Storyline I would include. So what’s the difference? If I were to include things like graphics software, video editing suites, audio editing software, then I would have to consider that anything used to create digital content would be an elearning authoring tool. That in turn makes the term a bit meaningless. So I need to narrow this definition down somehow to tools developed with the express intention for creating elearning products.
Most of the items listed on page 14 of the learning guild report fall into this latter definition (although the definition still needs work). Tools like dominKnow, Evolve, Adapt Learning, Rise360, etc. fit the bill. One interesting outlier could be a tool like Camtasia (Techsmith). Would you consider Camtasia to fall into this new definition?
I’m considering a definition that would be inclusive of Camtasia, but then I’d need to update from express intention for creating elearning products to includes capability to create elearning products. Why does Camtasia fall into this newer definition? Well, it has the ability to add quizzing elements and it can be exported as a SCORM object (of course that comes up).
Anyway, that is a really round about way to get at what made me start writing this post. Through looking around I found this old tool from UBC called the Multimedia Learning Object Authoring Tool. It’s from 2009, and the name is very 2009. I tracked down a copy of the website that was archived, so here is what it looked like in 2018.
Looking around the site, all of the objects seem to have been developed with Flash, so we know how this story ends. It got me thinking though, when choosing an authoring tool, are there safer technologies to choose than others? For example, H5P is build on HTML5 so I would presume that’s pretty safe from the same fate as Flash. Compared to say Captivate, which started life as Authorware, and is very specialized, H5P might be the safer bet. Definitely a more cost effective one.
Anyway, this lead me to this post on StackExchange, which might go down as my favourite post I’ll ever see on there, and so I had to share it:
A guess the flip-side of that, is Electron apps which are like a website opening inside of desktop App :^) That’s how MS Teams works on Mac and Windows at the same time. And I think Zoom too, might be an Electron App (so again Mac PC get the same features updates simultaneously).
But definitely the person from the future had it right. HTML CSS Javascript all still very much here.
And along the lines of Camtasia vs. say Authoring tools, yes Quizzing is definitely very much an authoring thing, as well as the recording of the answers, and so forth, definitely. But more important I think is the Camtasia and other screen recorders that have not just non-linear video editing (like Adobe Premiere) what sets it apart is the call-out, overlays, mouse-highlighting and graphics that go into Annotation of said video. That is not in Premiere, nor iMovie. And so for Mac, I would put screen recorders with annotation capabilities like that into the Authoring category too. Like Telestream’s Screenflow product. It costs less than Camtasia but was ALWAYS able to do screen recording of difficult, high resource apps (like Final Cut, which notoriously was hard to screen record tutorials for). Just a few bits/bobs that crossed my mind as I followed along.
Thanks for the comment Eric! I’ve never heard of electron apps before but that makes a lot of sense. Maybe one I’ve encountered before without knowing the name in addition to what you’ve listed is the Lumi desktop app for editing H5P. It works really well.
Thanks for mentioning Telestream I’ll check it out. As a long time Final Cut and Premiere editor, I would often capture screen recordings with say QuickTime and then edit in those editors. I like your point about the annotation tools. When I started using Camtasia, that is something that really stood out to me; that so many of the tools right at your finger tips were relevant to learning and development. Not to say you couldn’t do annotation in Premiere, it was always just a matter of fiddling instead of having a dedicated effect you could drag onto the timeline.
Lots for me to consider!