[ news ] Authoring tools upcoming : free games, snacks and mobile

There must be something about June for elearning authoring tool makers. In the last few days, I received some very interesting news from a few vendors. Unlike the LMS market, the authoring tools market does not have a lot of decent elearning authoring tools, so the news below will be very welcome to a lot of people on low budgets but high commitment to decent content.

Caspian's ThinkingWorlds goes free (for noncommercial use)

I've worked with Caspian's excellent ThinkingWorlds tool last year to create a few 3D immersive games for learning. One includes the Diversity@Play series that was a finalist in the IITT awards.

ThinkingWorlds ships with a lot of characters, objects and 3D worlds, so you as an instructional and game designer get to focus on what counts: the game scenario and its learning goals. On June 27, they will release version 3.5 of the tool. In the announcement mail, they say this version will be free for non-commercial use, so that should bring gaming into the reach of all! Other new features include publishing to Java (for web delivery, eg via an LMS and SCORM), publish to iPad,

Microsoft updated its free LCDS tool with snacks!

A few years ago, Microsoft released its e-learning authoring tool for free. It goes by the hard to remember name of LCDS, and if you like the templated output it offers, it is a very useful tool. If you want to go outside the templates and course paradigm the tool uses, you need another tool.
The interesting thing about the new update is the notion of learning 'snacks'. They are micro-courses of a limited number of topics, made in Microsoft's Flash-competitor Silverlight. And you can upload them to the SnackBox. So far the snackbox hosts most of Microsoft's own themes, but could the snackbox become to elearning what slideshare is for presentations and youtube for video? Maybe yes and maybe no, but it is a good initiative that actually merits copycats to jump on it. Some other tools try this 'open sharing' too, eg SnapChannel (Snap! by Lectora) or screencast.com (Jing).

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RapidIntake launches it's mlearning studio today

RapidIntake ran a beta of their mobile learning authoring platform mlearning studio the past months. Tonight, they are having a launch call that I plan to attend. RapidIntake has an online templated tool to create flash-based e-learning for a while now. For this release, they revamped their engine to work with HTML5 and open that up to mobile learning. I don't know what I'm going to see and how much it will cost. Typically RapidIntake plays into the 'affordable' price range, but the prices I see today on their site worry me. The demo on their site looks promising...

Things are moving in the authoring tools market...

Last month I already talked about Snap!, a powerpoint-to-elearning conversion tool similar to Articulate but at a fraction of its price. Now we see important updates in tools for mobile content, free game development for non commercial use, games going to iPads, micro-courses on the rise via snacks, ... At the same time, the focus on content itself fades in the favor of people and context. Interesting to watch...