Courseware:
Course Authoring Tools

Updated December 22, 2010

Course Authoring Tools or Course Development Tools allow designers to make tutorials, course components, and even entire courses. Educause (n.d.) describes them as software that enables course development, "Course Development: Software that aids in the design and development of courses (online or face-to-face)" (www.educause.edu).

While the terms Course Authoring Tools and Course Management Systems are sometimes used interchangeably, this site will consider Course Authoring Tools as those tools that allow the creation of course content, not just the management of the content. Susan Landay (2010) does a nice job of organizing and classifying the variety of tools used to actually make and manage a course, "To make sense of the myriad of eLearning solutions available in the marketplace, I broke them down into four categories that help explain the e-Learning process:

  1. Authoring [course development and creating your content]
  2. Games and add-on tools [games and interactions to reinforce and/or teach]
  3. Conferencing [connectivity tools used for webinars and synchronous learning]
  4. LMSs [learning management systems to administer and track training].
To help you remember these four components of e-Learning, perhaps this little mnemonic will help: Any Goofball Can Learn!" (para. 5).
I would add communication to the conferencing aspect. Listed below are a few Course Authoring Tools that are easy to use.

References:

Educause. (n.d.). Course Development Tools. Educause. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/node/645/tid/33275?time=1293055403

Landay, S. (2010, June 3). Part I: Authoring and Course Development Tools. Online Learning 101. Retrieved from
http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=124-1