A Comprehensive Guide to eLearning Authoring Tools

What is an Authoring Tool

An authoring tool is software that allows educators and students to create visual and interactive online content without the need for coding skills.

For teachers, it is essentially a digital assistant, designed to simplify the creation of innovative and engaging educational content. This includes e-learning courses, presentations, quizzes, and multimedia content.

For students, an authoring tool provides a canvas for expressing ideas through creative learning exercises.

Pixton: “Kids these days are aspiring to be content creators instead of rockstars, and authoring tools are crucial in enabling them to follow their dreams.”

LessonUp allows educators to seamlessly add interactive content to their lessons.

The Benefits of eLearning Authoring Tools

Improved Personalisation

The ability to create AND customise content allows content to be segmented in line with the learners’ needs. For example, adaptive learning paths can be created to address different learning styles, paces, and proficiency levels. This level of personalisation fosters a more relevant and accessible learning experience, allowing students to better engage with the core ideas and concepts of a topic.

Furthermore, an authoring tool goes beyond traditional content creation methods. It offers a range of interactive elements, such as quizzes and simulations, and incorporates multimedia tools, including animations and videos, in order to appeal to differing learning preferences.

This allows students to better engage with the core ideas and concepts of a topic, contributing to the creation of a more stimulating and engaging educational environment.

FeedbackFruits Tool Suite: “Authoring tools’ broader role in education lies in enabling teachers to become facilitators and designers of learning experiences. They’re not just about generating static content; they’re about fostering engagement, interactivity, and adaptability within educational materials.”

Loree: “The importance of authoring tools lies in their ability to enable educators to design courses that are not only informative but also engaging and accessible.“

Faster Content Creation

By providing pre-equipped features for seamless integration into content, such as templates, themes, and interactions, authoring tools can significantly reduce the development time associated with constructing learning materials.

This efficiency is particularly valuable for educators who can create high-quality, engaging content more rapidly, allowing them to focus on refining and tailoring the material to meet the specific needs of their students.

FeedbackFruits Tool Suite: “The most important aspect of an authoring tool is that it allows faculties to save time in set-up”.

Greater Alignment with Educational Standards

The customisability of authoring tools extends beyond basic adjustments; it enables real-time updates and revisions to learning materials across all skill levels and subjects. Educators can promptly address errors, incorporate new information, or adapt content based on emerging educational trends.

This flexibility ensures that students consistently receive up-to-date and accurate information, and that schools are compliant with evolving educational demands and regulations.

Pixton: “People think authoring tools, including ours, are only for fun or once-in-a-while activities. In reality, they’re multi-modal writing tools with enormous versatility, applicable to a broad range of skill levels and subjects – from ELA and SEL, to Social Studies and STEM.”

Increased Staff Collaboration

Educators can use authoring tools to work together on refining and enhancing content. For instance, teachers can collaboratively create and improve shared resources, leveraging the collective expertise of the teaching staff.

This collaborative aspect promotes a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring that the learning materials are enriched with diverse perspectives and insights.

Broader Inclusivity and Accessibility

Certain authoring tools will incorporate features like text-to-speech, closed captions, and alternative text for images, meaning content can be designed with various learning styles and abilities in mind.

This helps ensure that educational materials are accessible to a diverse range of students, including those with different learning preferences and needs.

Pixton: “Authoring tools are essential because they enable anyone of any ability to exercise their creativity and make their ideas tangible, no matter the topic.”

Loree: “Authoring tools go beyond simply “making things pretty”; they are instrumental in creating educational experiences that are cognitively accessible and responsive to diverse learning needs. This aspect is crucial in reducing cognitive overload and stress for learners, which can arise from poorly structured or inaccessible online materials.”

FeedbackFruits Tool Suite: “People think authoring tools are used simply for compiling course content together. While this might have been true in the past, it is not the case anymore. Now they have become the places where the learning journey of the students is carefully curated, especially from a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) perspective.”

Increased Student Collaboration

Given their creative nature, authoring tools work effectively as a collaborative learning tool. Students can contribute, edit, and comment on a task through a shared workspace, fostering teamwork, communication, and shared knowledge, and ultimately preparing them for collaborative work in real-world settings.

What do our users think?

To really understand the likely benefits of a solution, it’s important that outcomes are effectively evidenced. After all, it’s one thing stating the benefits of your product; it’s another thing proving that the impact actually occurs.

On EdTech Impact, we ask our providers to map their solutions to their intended impact (the outcomes they claim to improve), using our outcome taxonomy:

Then, once outcomes are selected, users can rate each outcome individually during their review. This helps future buyers understand the specific areas each solution targets, as well as their effectiveness, based on user experience, in realising these goals.

On our authoring tools marketplace, 22 solutions have listed outcomes. These outcomes have been rated 162 times between them. Here are the most common outcomes, along with their impact ratings:

This data allows you to form a general understanding of the outcomes delivered by authoring tools for teachers, learners, and schools. This includes their most common outcomes, as well as their perceived effectiveness in delivering them (based on user experience).

Developing a Procurement Strategy

Before you even consider searching for an eLearning authoring tool, it’s important to devise an effective procurement strategy.

In order to do so, first define the problem that your prospective solution should address. With EdTech systems, it can be very easy to get drawn into conversations for tools that look fun or impressive, but in fact have minimal learning impact in relation to your school and its needs. By defining your problem, your market research will instead be guided towards the solutions aligned with your specific goals.

Next, establish the accessibility and contractual parameters that the chosen solution must meet. This will help to ensure that potential barriers to the authoring tool’s successful implementation in your school are restricted as much as they can be, supporting the realisation of your intended outcome.

Procurement Strategy: Defining the Problem

It is very likely that an EdTech provider will make general assertions regarding their solution’s ability to improve your outcomes. It is therefore in your interest to nail down the specifics, including the objective itself, the area it impacts, and how you plan to use the EdTech solution to bring about its realisation.

Identifying your specific objectives adds precision to your market research, providing a clearer focus on the relevance of a prospective solution to deliver your goals. As a useful starting point, our impact taxonomy – found in the earlier “Benefits of Authoring Tools for Schools” section – provides specific goals that can be mapped to (or help shape) the objectives of your procurement strategy. It also groups the outcomes under individual subheadings, which can be used to help delineate the area of your school that requires support.

The perceived effectiveness of authoring tools based on the areas they impact.

Procurement Strategy: Accessibility Parameters

Technology Considerations

Training and Support

In the DfE’s Implementation of Education Technology in Schools and Colleges report, 68% and 35% of schools determined “Staff skills and confidence with technology” and “Staff willingness to use technology” as respective “Barriers or challenges experienced when implementing new technology”.

Not only does this demonstrate the pressing need to demystify and destigmatise the use of technology in schools, it also highlights that the successful implementation of an EdTech solution is likely underpinned by the “Training and Support” it delivers.

When it comes to authoring tools for schools, here are the types of training and support you can expect to find (based on our marketplace):

Integration with Existing Technology

The eLearning authoring tools found on EdTech Impact are predominantly “standalone” products.

Native Authoring Tool vs Standalone Authoring Tool

A native authoring tool is built in to a specific platform or environment, such as a particular Learning Management System (LMS) or content delivery system. It is designed to work optimally within the platform, leveraging its features and capabilities.

A standalone authoring tool is independently operating, making it accessible to users without requiring a specific environment. It is designed specifically for creating digital content, containing its own wide range of features for content creation, such as multimedia integration, interactivity, quizzes, and assessments.

The decision between the two hinges on several critical factors. Accessibility plays a key role, as standalone tools are accessible without the need for a specific environment, offering flexibility to users. Compatibility is another vital consideration—native tools seamlessly integrate into specific platforms, ensuring optimal performance within a designated ecosystem. Additionally, feature preferences come into play, with standalone tools offering a diverse set of features for content creation, while native tools leverage platform-specific capabilities.

This makes it paramount that the weighted importance of the solution’s integration with your institution’s LMS is discerned. If the solution is not compatible with your LMS, and therefore doesn’t support content or analytical integration, it may not be suitable.

Compatibility Requirements

Other important considerations relate to the solution’s compatibility requirements. What desktop processors – eg. Windows, Linux, Mac – are employed by your school? Do you require mobile compatibility? Will you and your students, at times, need access to the authoring tool without internet connection?

User Considerations

Your market research should also be focused on user considerations that ensure the solution is accessible and appropriate to the people who will be using it. This means it is vitally important that the specific accessibility needs of your school and its learners are discerned and outlined.

Important user requirements to consider relate to aspects such as:

SEN Support
Language Availability
Parent Access
Learner Ages
Subject Alignment

75% of our authoring tools solutions provide Parent Access.

By mapping out your accessibility needs from a technological and user standpoint, you are limiting potential barriers and issues – from your side, as a consumer – that can prevent the solution from achieving its intended outcome. Essentially, you are optimally setting the groundwork for the authoring tool’s successful implementation in your school.

Procurement Strategy: Contractual Parameters

An effective procurement strategy will note your institution’s budgeting realities and establish the most appropriate pricing model.

Our authoring tool marketplace found that paid solutions will generally adopt a yearly subscription pricing model, and that the average and median price for a yearly subscription is £83.98 and £72 respectively.

Additionally, it’s important to recognise that free products are often self-service, and therefore rarely come with account management support or training. This means you will need to determine how much time yourself and others are prepared to invest in learning how to use the solution, and subsequently assess the potential trade-off.

The Future of eLearning Authoring Tools

Authoring tools are a fairly mature, and, according to our audience, fairly high-performing EdTech market.

But how do they plan to keep up with evolving educational and technological demands? Here’s what our experts had to say:

1. Broader Compatibility

Loree: “As education becomes more mobile and cross-platform, authoring tools will evolve to ensure that educational content is accessible and engaging across various devices and platforms.”

2. Refined Intuitiveness and User-Friendliness

FeedbackFruits Tool Suite: “Authoring tools will likely become more intuitive and AI-driven, offering features like adaptive learning pathways, personalised content creation suggestions, and real-time analytics to enhance teaching effectiveness.”

Loree: “The focus will be on making these tools more intuitive and user-friendly, enabling educators to easily create and modify content without needing extensive technical expertise.”

3. Further Incorporation of Diverse Content

Loree: “Authoring tools will increasingly be able to seamlessly integrate content from a variety of sources, allowing for more dynamic and rich educational materials.”

4. Improved Adaptability and Flexibility

Pixton: “Authoring tools must do a better job of adapting to the user’s individual preferences, culture, values, and experiences.”

Loree: “They will offer greater flexibility in creating courses that can be tailored to different learning paths, accommodating diverse learner needs and preferences.”

The Best eLearning Authoring Tools, According to EdTech Impact Users

	Socrative A library of easily creatable activities, including quizzes, games, and many more, that can be distributed on-the-fly to quickly engage learners and assess their topic understanding.
	Pixton A story creation tool that enhances writing assignments by enabling students to demonstrate their learning through engaging comics across various subjects.
	LessonUp A customisable teaching tool and lesson library that empowers teachers to create engaging lessons and interactive exercises for students.
	Powtoon Media library for use across all staff levels to improve everyday communications. Includes the creation and customisation of assignments, announcements, and training exercises.
	Edumate An AI-powered smart resource converter turns printed & handwritten resources into online activities, with automatic marking, personalised feedback, and real-time progress tracking.
	Genially Ready-made, customisable designs that enable teachers to reimagine any type of static content as an interactive, multimedia learning resource across all subjects and grades.
	ThingLink Easily annotate images, videos, 3D objects, and 360-degree virtual tours with enriching, context-specific information and transform them into dynamic, interactive learning resources.
	Book Creator A simple, inclusive book creation tool that allows learners to demonstrate their learning and express creativity with an audience beyond the teacher.