POV: You’re a newbie who wants to create an e-learning course. You’ve got all your knowledge resources set, and you’re ready to give massive value in this course. However, you have no idea of the tools you need to create a custom eLearning course. Now, you don't have to look far. Read this article to find out the best tools for creating custom eLearning courses. Let’s dive right in:

1. An Authoring Tool

This is the most important tool of all tools you need to find. An eLearning authoring tool is a program that allows you to create online courses or lessons using various features such as videos, text, and media. There are both paid and free eLearning authoring tools. These tools can vary in their capacity and specialties. Before picking an online tool to create your course, you have to make sure it checks out on some preset qualifications. 

Examples of qualifications that you can use to filter out the best authoring tool include:

• Budget: The amount of money you have to spend on an authoring tool is a huge factor in determining your choice. The more you can pay, the more customization choices you can access. For example, tools like Lectora Online are quite expensive, although it also offers a lot of customization choices. However, people on a tight budget can try tools like iSpring Free. 

• Level of Customization: when making a course, you might have some design ideas you want to create. Also, coders who create courses might want to use coding to create designs for themselves. While some tools allow the above, some are more simplistic in nature. So, depending on your level of expertise, you can pick the type of authoring tool to use.
• Ease of Learning: This particularly applies to newbies. If you’re new at creating courses, it is better to pick a tool you can easily learn. These tools will give design suggestions and have pre-made templates that will make your course creation journey easier. That way, you can produce your course a lot faster.

Some good examples of authoring tools you can use include:

• iSpring Suite Max: This authoring tool gives you a mix of both ease and a high level of customization. It has an interface similar to Microsoft Powerpoint, so you’ll feel right at home using it. Also, it allows you to import any pre-made Powerpoint presentation, which you can edit to your satisfaction. Also, it packs a punch for the more demanding course creators. Finally, if you’re a coder or prefer more customization controls, iSpring allows the liberty to add in more complex scenarios.

• Adobe Captivate: This tool also offers a lot of customization controls in its layout. If you’re an experienced course creator, you might be better suited to this tool. It provides many complex features that make it a little harder to learn. However, if you’ll be doing only the basics, you can get accustomed to the tool in no time.
• Articulate Storyline: This is another tool that allows a high level of customization. It allows the use of various special effects and end-user interactive features. However, collaboration on this tool is very difficult as it does not offer any cloud storage, unlike the other options above.

1. Video Editing Tools

When creating courses, it is no news that video courses tend to grab students’ attention more than courses containing text only. While authoring tools can mostly record videos and edit them, a few do not have any video recording abilities. Also, you could want to create an existing video which you could then import to your authoring tool for further editing. Below are a few examples of video recording and editing tools you can use for your eLearning course:

• Camtasia: This is a video editing tool that is very popular among eLearning content creators due to its ability to also input some interactive features (e.g., quizzes, surveys) into videos. Apart from this, it can also do the basic work of adding visual effects and stock audios to video clips. It helps create high-quality video courses which make the content resonate better with your audience. However, if you’re new to creating video courses, you might need to spend some time learning and experimenting with this tool to be able to use it optimally.

• Adobe Premiere Pro: This video editing app helps to give powerful editing power to the user while also giving them an intuitive interface to work with. However, this tool is also a little bit specialized for experienced video editors. If you’ll like a tool that affords a bit more simplicity, Adobe Premiere Elements is a good choice.
• Snagit: This is a simple tool that you can use for recording videos and doing some basic editing such as cropping, adding some texts, or trimming the video. This tool is quite easy to use and is compatible with both Windows and Mac.

1. Voiceover Tools

Ever tried watching a video with a bad sound? It would sound so annoying! Unfortunately, this is exactly how your course would sound with lousy audio. High-quality video with bad audio will leave students uninterested in the course. In some cases, your authoring tool might not have the best audio recording capabilities; hence, you need to use external voice recording tools. Below are some tips that can help your voice recording sound so much better:

• Use a good microphone: One universal rule of voice recording is never to use your computer microphone. It always turns out bad in most cases. Instead, try to get a condenser or dynamic microphone. These two will produce better sounds and make the voices in your video courses sound crystal clear.

• Deaden the sound: Recording audios in a room close to noisy areas such as restrooms or cafes would only make your audio turn out bad irrespective of the microphone. You don’t have to go all out with soundproofing. Just cover the walls with materials such as fleece or moving blankets.
• Use a preamp: If you’re very particular about making your sound turn out to be the best, you can use a preamp. A preamp is a piece of hardware you can connect to your PC to make your audio recordings sound less noisy and distorted.

Conclusion

Creating your course can be a daunting experience if you don’t have the right tools to use. However, by using any of the tools mentioned above, you should be able to get your course created in no time! We wish you all the best!