TOP 10 TOOLS 2008 & 2009
Rob Hubbard

Rob Hubbard is a creative elearning architect based in the midlands, UK. His company LearningAge Solutions provides instructional design, elearning consultancy, and bespoke content development services. Rob is sick of dull elearning and wants to help more people build better content.

Rob's Top 10 Tools as at 10 May 2009

1. Articulate – A great elearning author tool, we now use this for many projects as it means our clients can edit the content. It doesn’t do ‘everything’ but what is does it does well.
2. Thinking Worlds – A tremendous author tool for building 3D immersive environments. As an instructional designer this is something I’ve been waiting a long time for. Fairly steep learning curve but it opens up so many new possibilities for elearning design.
3. Captivate – I haven’t moved on to the latest version yet and I suspect it will still be full of Captivate’s ‘charming idiosyncrasies’. Still, despite the warts you can do an awful lot with it. Great for building complex scenarios – it’s not just for IT system training!
4. MS Entourage – I’ve moved to a Mac and my what a painful process that was. Now that my Mac and I are on speaking terms I do appreciate Entourage – the Mac version of Outlook. It has these great ‘Projects’ where you can associate mail, tasks, calendar entries and notes to specific projects – very useful.
5. Basecamp – I tried this on a recommendation and haven’t looked back. For working with project teams geographically dispersed this online tool is brilliant. Saves me stacks of time. The downside is that it’s not as visual as MS Project.
6. MS Project – Still my preferred way to plan any project. Just wish it was web-based and collaborative. Yes I know it can be, however it costs a fortune. I end up moving all the key milestones over to Basecamp manually.
7. Google Docs – So useful for collaborative working on docs, spreadsheets or for booking forms online. Great and free.
8. Prezi – Online zooming presentation tool - like a mindmap but with almost infinite zooming and paths. I’ve been using this since Beta release and really rate it. My only gripe is the bloated files it produces. Would love to use this as navigation for an elearning course or as the front end to an LMS.
9. VMware Fusion – Allows me to run Windows XP on my Mac. Vital since Captivate and Articulate are Windows only. Runs like a dream though it does halve the performance.
10. Mindmeister – I’ve been really getting into this collaborative mindmapping tool. Recently created a collaborative mindmap as the basis for discussions in a conference session. People from round the world contributed and on the day delegates worked on it in real time.

Rob's Top 10 Tools as at 23 January 2008

1. Flash - My workhorse development tool. What can I say – Flash rocks. I use this for prototyping interactivity, building mock-ups for proposals and even for creating artwork. It’s good with audio and now video. Been using it for years and will certainly continue to do so.

2. Google Alerts - I get regular alerts via email and this is the main way I keep up on elearning news. I haven’t got into rss yet and in the meantime this simple solution suits me well.

3. GridMagic for Blackberry - I recently changed from having a PDA phone to a Blackberry Pearl. It is great to have my email on the move, however I couldn’t believe the Blackberry wouldn’t let me view and edit Excel spreadsheets on my phone and sync them to my laptop. After much hunting about I unearthed this little application which does exactly that. Indispensable.

4. MS Outlook - I don’t have any beef with Microsoft, and find that Outlook does everything I need it to. I love the way I can sync tasks, calendar and contacts up to my Blackberry. It has been great for managing multiple email accounts and aliases.

5. MS Word - I spend much of my time working in Word. The tracked changes and compare functionality took a little while to work out but I now find it indispensable. Storyboards and design documents always go through many revisions and Word helps me keep track of them all.

6. Photoshop - I use an old version of Photoshop, but it does everything I need. Took me a while to get my head around it, but now I find it quick and easy. The 2-up display when compressing images is really useful.

7. Skype - I have a love/hate relationship with Skype. I love the fact I can make free audio calls to other Skype users and low cost calls to international landlines. I hate the issues with sound quality and calls dropping, and still haven’t got audio conferencing to work reliably. I love the way I can transfer files and badger developers on the other side of the world in real time. However it can also be a real time-drain and a distraction (particularly for the developers).

8. Sound Forge - My audio editor of choice. I’ve been in bands and had a home studio for a long time and have always used Sound Forge for editing recordings. I try other audio editors from time to time, but I always return to this one. I like the shortcuts and menu structure, it allows me to work fast.

9. Udutu - This is a relatively new free web-based elearning authoring tool. The templates aren’t the prettiest so I tend to use it as a SCORM wrapper, develop my interactivity in Flash and import it. For a free tool however, I think it is excellent, and have been raving about it to anyone who will listen. You can publish your content with a watermark for free, pay for Udutu to host it, or export your course for free (no watermark) to host on your LMS or web space.

10. Yugma - Free web conferencing tool. I’ve run several course and document reviews using this tool and it has worked well. The new browser-based web conference tool dimdim might well give them a run for their money though.