Quick, what are the most popular authoring tools for building on-line courseware? 

Dreamweaver, Flash, Toolbook, Authorware, Director, PowerPoint.  

PowerPoint?  That’s not a tool for building on-line courses.  Or is it?  Not only is it a tool for building on-line courses.  It’s the second most-popular tool, according to a recent survey conducted by Bersin & Associates.  In March of 2003, we asked 3,500 subscribers of On-Line Learning Magazine the question:

What are the 3 most frequently tools for creating your computer-based training applications?

Dreamweaver	52%
PowerPoint	48%
Flash	46%
Word	22%
FrontPage	21%
Authorware	20%

(Respondents were allowed to select more than one tool, therefore the percentages total more than 100%)?

But instructional designers don’t consider PowerPoint to be a real content development tool, do they? After all, experts will tell you that one of the most important factors in the success of an e-learning initiative is how engaging the courseware is.  PowerPoint presentations, while they be can interesting to watch if someone is speaking, aren’t usually considered engaging by themselves.  And if learners get bored quickly completion rates go down - fast.   So what are these e-learning professionals doing with PowerPoint?

Well, several things that don’t necessarily mean they’re delivering boring courses. First of all, PowerPoint can be a useful tool for storyboarding courseware.  Because it’s an easy-to-use tool for creating sequence, basic layout, and priority of messages, course designers use it to agree on what the course will communicate before it’s actually built.  And of course, it’s also the tool of choice for building instructor-led courses so much of the source material that instructional designers receive already exists in PowerPoint.

In fact, the same study mentioned above revealed that 30% of responders indicated that at least half their source material comes to them in PowerPoint format.

But I suspect that many of you out there (and you know who you are) are, in fact, using PowerPoint to author e-learning “courses”.  And there can be good reasons for this.  Perhaps the course needs to be available next week and there’s no time to build a higher quality product.   Maybe the material is perishable and doesn’t justify the investment in a course that will be obsolete soon.   Or the course is short enough that a simple PowerPoint version will do just fine.  Possibly, there is no budget for a larger project.  And the list goes on.  The point here is that there may be very good business and training reasons that a PowerPoint course is perfectly suitable for a given situation.

And the number of situations may be increasing with a new product from Macromedia called Breeze  (Formerly Presedia).  Breeze is an integrated system for rapidly creating and delivering Flash-based e-learning courses.  The authoring tool for Breeze is not only the second most popular e-learning tool but it’s also the tool of choice for subject matter experts (SMEs) - PowerPoint.   So SMEs can build e-learning courses, you ask? Well, yes.

Breeze is so easy to use that anyone who knows how to use PowerPoint can build an e-learning course, complete with an assessment, and an audio track then deliver it through an easy-to-use interface to thousands of students – in an afternoon.  The course will be automatically tracked using an integrated standards-compliant (AICC and SCORM) LMS complete with a great reporting tool.  So student performance results are available even quicker than the course.

But wait, PowerPoint presentations are page-turners!  Not anymore.  Breeze turns PowerPoint presentations into an engaging course using (1) an audio track that can be easily recorded using a standard PC microphone, (2) Flash playback which means that the course can be accessed using a standard browser AND more engaging content can also be used to spruce up the course (3) a navigation panel is automatically inserted into the presentation to enable learners to move about the course quickly and easily.

But wait, what about instructional integrity? SMEs don’t know how to build courses! That’s generally true. Breeze is not a substitute for a professionally designed asynchronous course. But it can used for the myriad of training problems in which getting learners trained faster is better than not training them at all. And there’s no reason that Breeze can’t be used in conjunction with the expertise of an instructional designer (in-person or through templates) to be sure that learners get the point. In fact, Breeze can be used to free up professional developers to focus on higher quality material that demands their more of their expertise.

This trend of identifying some e-learning challenges as needing a quicker solution that requires little technical expertise has been called “rapid e-learning”. Rapid e-learning tools have up to now been targeted at instructional designers. They typically provide an easy-to-use interface that enables a course to be assembled quickly. Breeze makes rapid e-learning more accessible by placing the authoring and deployment tools right into the hands of SMEs.

Kevin M. Lynch, Vice President of Sales and Product Marketing at Macromedia, comments “Our customers are using Breeze to shorten the process of getting training information from those who have it to those who need it”.

Some Breeze customers are pushing the envelope of this new paradigm by building full fledged courses for critical training challenges such as safety certification.  Another Breeze customer built a course and trained 7,000 channel partners – in two days.

While it may not be appropriate for all e-learning challenges, Breeze has tremendous potential because it leverages the Flash player to present browser-based courseware.  The same platform can be used to delivery very simple PowerPoint presentations or more graphically interesting courses authored by professional developers.  The low cost of production and rapid delivery of Breeze courses is compelling and leads me to believe that PowerPoint may, in fact, accelerate the adoption of rapid e-learning.

More information about Breeze is available at http://www.macromedia.com/.  Some additional resources include the Breeze overview presentation at http://www.macromedia.com/software/breeze/overview .