8 big benefits of using an authoring tool
Whether you’re technically-minded or new to the benefits of using an authoring tool, Gomo will make your life easier. In this blog post, we take a look at some of the ways our users create, host, and distribute learning with Gomo, the market-leading cloud-based fully responsive authoring tool.
Making teamwork easy with an eLearning authoring tool
A cloud-based authoring tool can make collaboration easy, wherever your team happen to be.
Gomo is built for collaboration, and the quickest way to get your team working together is to add them as additional Gomo users. You can easily do this by using the Team button on the top left of the screen.
Your team members can then work on your courses wherever and whenever it suits them. Plus, you can easily allocate course contributors and stakeholders into the right roles – administrator, editor or reviewer – without the need to download any software or arrange permissions with IT managers.
Managing and allocating tasks is vital when many people are working on a project.
The Tasks tab in Gomo allows collaborators and reviewers to make notes and assign tasks to specific users. There’s no need to worry about your team members overwriting each other’s work either – whenever you see a red square around a topic, that means one of your collaborators is editing it, as in the below example.
You can also share your project with someone who does not have a Gomo license by turning sharing on and sending them the link or QR code, as in the screenshot below.
2. Create your style by using an authoring tool
Even if you’ve created dozens of courses using the same look and feel, you might decide to freshen up their designs and change things up for your learners.
With the themes function in Gomo, you can dynamically change the look and feel of your courses in just a few clicks. Plus, you can roll out the changes to all your courses, which is helpful if your organization decides to re-brand.
If you click on Settings, then Theme, you can customize a theme to suit your needs. You might choose to modify the template from bright colors to a subtler palette, or you may wish to tinker with the colors of buttons, fonts and headers and footers.
By using an authoring tool to switch a few settings, you can make a huge difference to the look of the course.
3. Manage topics using an authoring tool
Using an eLearning authoring tool allows you to easily edit the content and structure of your course topics.
In Gomo, you can edit topics by navigating to the Actions button. From here, you can manually create a topic, import a topic from another course or import question banks around each topic. You can also change the settings of these topics by right-clicking around the screen.
Within the settings, some of the features of each topic you can change include:
- The title of the topic
- Its production status
- The layout (horizontal or vertical)
- Whether the topic uses continuous scroll
4. Know your basic buttons from your advanced ones
Authoring tools have advanced features that give you the power to add extra interactivity to your courses.
In Gomo, you can use button assets to create a whole host of different interactions to engage your learners.
But what’s the difference between a Button and a Menu Button in Gomo?
Well, Menu Buttons can only do one thing – link to another screen. For anything else, you’ll want to use an advanced Button.
To do this, click on Actions. From there, you can apply multiple actions to a single button.
Typically, these action types might be:
- Changing the content language
- Playing an audio file
- Creating a pop-up or a screen that gradually reveals itself from a set direction
- Providing specific feedback according to how a learner answers a question
- Linking to a new screen or topic
You can also link to a subscreen, different types of files, websites and more.
5. Add photos and videos with ease
Multimedia content is an essential component of any engaging course. With an authoring tool you can quickly add video, audio and images to your courses.
In Gomo, you can upload videos or use IFrames which allow you to link to videos that are on YouTube, Vimeo or any web server. One of the most common mistakes people make when they use an IFrame link is pasting in the web address of the video they want to embed in the Gomo course.
What you actually need is the portion of the embed code between the end of the https bit and the end of the quotes (do not include the quotes in the code).
Occasionally, people do not know where to find the images they want to add to a page because they haven’t refreshed their web browser. You can also find images you’ve previously uploaded by searching for the name of the image when you double-click to add an image.
You can search for them in specific folders, if you know roughly where they are, and you can also select a thumbnail view of your image library to make spotting the images you want easier.
6. Preview your courses using an authoring tool
Without an authoring tool, it’s often harder for course developers to easily preview their courses during development.
Want to see what your courses will look like in Gomo?
Simply go to Actions and select the option to preview your project. You can then see how it will look on different devices such as a tablet or phone, and check that your table of contents is still going to be finger-friendly, for example.
Our built-in previewer lets you test out your courses on different devices and orientations. That way you’ll be certain that your courses are going to work before you deploy them.
7. Using an authoring tool to choose your distribution methods
Uploading and sharing your courses can often be time-consuming, but Gomo has features that make getting your courses to your learners incredibly simple. There are several ways to distribute a Gomo-designed course. If you want to embed a course within a website or send a link to someone, choose direct access from the settings option and you’ll be given the embed codes and direct links to distribute.
You can ‘embed’ a Gomo course in any SCORM LMS using the unique Gomo LMS wrapper. This allows you to upload in seconds and also update the course without having to republish it to the LMS.
You can fully track these with Gomo’s xAPI analytics, giving you valuable insights into how many times the course has been launched, completed passed or failed, for example.
8. Ask for support tickets on technical issues
To get the most out of your authoring tool, make sure you can access help as and when you need it.
Luckily, you’ll never be stuck or have to incur expensive support costs if you’ve got questions about using Gomo.
If you have any queries while you’re using our authoring tool, simply click on the ‘Live chat’ button and an agent will try and help you. You can also raise tickets to put a ticket into the queue for Gomo support.
We pride ourselves on being quick to respond and we can always work with you to address any specific technical requirements your organization might have.
You can also search our knowledge base for support info.
To find out more about the benefits of using an authoring tool by watching this straightforward video guide.