Speed up course creation with these 4 eLearning authoring tool features

Learning designers are busy. Faced with competing eLearning authoring demands, it’s no surprise that nearly 75% of L&D professionals cite a lack of time as the greatest hurdle they must overcome—that’s according to a report from Gomo’s sister company, Bridge.

But a lack of time doesn’t have to be an obstacle to designing and delivering high-quality eLearning courses.

Read on to discover four time-saving content creation features that help you maximize your time and resources.

4 authoring features to speed up and simplify course creation

Here are four content creation must-haves to prioritize in an authoring tool.

1) Question banks

An intuitive, drag-and-drop interface and a centralized resource library can help you populate assets quickly. Take question banks, for example. If your authoring tool provides a central repository for storing questions and answers, you’re able to categorize them by topic and pull existing questions into any relevant course.

Question banks can make assessments more meaningful for your people. They help you add variety and enhance test knowledge recall by serving a different selection of questions every time they take your course.

2) Screen templates

You want the power to display your learning in rich, interactive formats. With an intuitive and easy-to-use tool, it’s as simple as picking a predefined screen template, complete with layouts, assets, and subscreens.

These templates increase learning designer productivity, ensuring course content is delivered in an aesthetically pleasing and engaging way. With the formatting taken care of, all that’s left to do is populate a screen with text, images, and other media.

3) Responsive and adaptive design

An authoring tool with a responsive and adaptive layout makes course building a breeze. Gomo, for example, achieves this with flexible layout columns and content blocks. Because they automatically scale and adjust to fit the learners’ screen size and screen orientation, there’s no need to build the same course multiple times or worry about nudging each asset or pixel into place. In this way, you’ll be confident that the end result will look great, no matter what device or screen size learners use.

4) Pre-packaged theme templates

A good authoring tool will take care of the look and feel of courses for you with customizable visual themes. With a theme library, learning designers can define the look and feel of the courses without having to customize each screen.

A preset theme handles aspects such as layout, font, and background, and ideally, you should be able to customize elements such as theme color, font, and logos to reflect your own branding. As a result, it’s quick and straightforward to give courses a consistent, on-brand look and feel, making them instantly recognizable to learners.

This is where a cloud-based authoring tool shines, as it should be possible to centrally define a theme used across all of your course content. Any visual changes made to this theme will instantly be reflected across your library, meaning there’s no need to edit courses individually.