As we know, Rapid E-Learning is subject matter expert-centric, based on authoring or developing content with easy-to-use, ubiquitous platforms like PowerPoint & Flash, and enables content to be developed in a matter of days, not than weeks or months. Rapid e-learning does not mean taking liberties with well-established content development processes.
Rather, it is an approach to content development that enables SMEs to author content quickly and efficiently, typically using learning professionals as coaches and assistants in the process.
The two tenets of rapid e-learning are:
- Ease of development
- Short development time frames
The key to successful rapid e-learning is having tools and templates that make it easy for practically any expert to quickly create effective learning materials.
However, rapid content authoring is only part of the story. The end-to-end content design, development, delivery, management and maintenance cycle demands a broad range of skills (I talked about some of these here), and a number of computer applications to support and leverage these steps of the e-learning development process.
In my never-ending pursuit of enhancing performance when using the Rapid E-Learning methodology, I regularly assess new applications, tools, and utilities to assess their value in my learning and development content production procedures. Here are the applications I’m going to evaluate over the next few months. Of course, I’ll blog my views on them over that period of time. Interestingly, only a few of these apps are ‘pure’ e-learning development tools; the others I intend to use to facilitate aspects of the content development process, rather than to actually develop learning materials.
Serena Prototype Composer 2009
Serena Prototype Composer is an application planning, modeling and prototyping environment for non-technical users to visually define 
their application needs, including business processes, activities, user interfaces, requirements, and data. Models can be derived from existing resources such as Web applications and can be published as running prototypes as well as Microsoft Word specifications.
WebCAT
The Web Category Analysis Tool is an open source utility that allows designers and usability engineer to test a proposed or existing website or CMS/LMS ontology or categorization scheme. This 
enables knowledge managers (and instructional designers) to determine how well taxonomies, categories and learning content objects are understood by users. WebCAT is a variation on the traditional card sorting paradigm, where users are guided to generate a category tree or even a folksonomy.
Stanza Desktop
Stanza Desktop is an e-book publishing tool, designed for generate digital publications, including electronic books, newspapers, PDFs, and general Web content for a range of hardware platforms. It 
supports HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and Rich Text Format reading, as well as all the major e-book standards: unprotected Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, Palm doc, and the International Digital Publishing Forum’s new EPUB Open eBook standard. According to the developers, Stanza is designed to to make reading on your Macintosh, PC or mobile device an “enjoyable and hassle-free” experience.
iWebkit
iWebKit is a GNU-licensed file package and content framework designed to enable those without the time or the programming skills to use the iPhone 
SDK to create iPhone and iPod Touch compatible websites and webapps. According to the developers, the kit is accessible to anyone – even people without any html knowledge. and is simple to understand thanks to the included tutorials. We’ll see.
Microsoft Learning Content Development System
The Microsoft Learning Content Development System (LCDS) is a free-to-use tool that enables the developers to create interactive, 
online courses. The LCDS allows anyone to publish e-learning courses by completing the easy-to-use LCDS forms that seamlessly generate highly customized content, interactive activities, quizzes, games, assessments, animations, demos, and other multimedia.
PowerManual
PowerManual addresses the needs of presenters, trainers and 
anyone who uses PowerPoint on a regular basis. PowerManual enables you to produce high quality documents in a range of formats, including Word, PDF and HTML.PowerManual enables the creation of cover pages, logos, custom headers and footers, document pagination, on-the-fly slide updating, as well as PowerPoint slidestack management.
As I said, I’ll be reviewing the apps, testing and reporting on their functionality, ease-of-use, suitability of purpose, adaptability to e-learning, and so on. I’d like to hear your opinions: do you already use some or all of these tools? What do you think of them? Are you going to evaluate them yourself, based on my suggestion? Are there any other tools in the same space that are more effective?
Let me know what you think by commenting in the space below.
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