On July 26th, ATD NYC eLearning SIG co-chair Mark Cassetta and I gave a standing-room-only session on The Rise of Web-Based Development Tools. Mark gave an excellent demo of the web-based tool Adapt. And I followed up with a brief look at the Rise web-based tool included with the Articulate 360 suite. There are of course other web-based eLearning development tools surfacing, but we felt these two were the strongest ones out of the gate.
Adapt has been around longer (since 2013), and as Mark demonstrated, is currently far more fully-featured than Articulate’s Rise tool. The fact that Adapt is open source and offers a fully-functional free version should send you running to check it out. Rise is not free; it’s only available with a subscription to the Articulate 360 suite. But as I demonstrated, this new tool already has a great look and feel, and allows you to put together great-looking modules in a fraction of the time you’d need developing in Articulate’s Storyline, or Adobe’s Captivate or similar products.
Mark and I pointed out that in addition to providing for faster, cheaper development, web-based tools are also designed to create content that is fully responsive in design–the courseware will automatically adapt its layout depending on whether your learners access it from a laptop, a tablet, or a smartphone. In this day of one-the-go, just-in-time training, this mobile-friendly element is huge. And the learning curve for both tools is surprisingly low.
You can read more about Adapt here: https://www.adaptlearning.org
And you can read more about Rise here: https://articulate.com/360/rise
Our next ATD NYC eLearning SIG session will be on Wednesday, September 27th–put that date in your calendar now!