Speaker 1: Hello my friends, my name is Devlin Peck and today we're going to take a look at the top instructional design tools, software and technology. So if you're trying to become an instructional designer, this video should give you a good idea of which tools to prioritize as well as how difficult they are to learn and which resources are best for learning them. And if you're already an instructional designer, then this should give you some good ideas of how to focus on your own professional development and upscaling. So let's dive right in and start with Articulate Storyline 360. So this tool lets you develop interactive e-learning experiences and you can develop anything from software simulations to like scenario-based simulations, to quizzes, like gamified experiences, slide-based courses, all sorts of stuff. It's very flexible. It's also the most popular tool in the industry. So this probably isn't the first time you're hearing about it. And we interviewed 101 hiring managers last year and asked them, what are the top three tools that instructional designers should be familiar with when they are hired onto the job? And 86% of them said Articulate Storyline 360. So the next tool was trailed pretty severely. So Storyline is definitely the most popular. If you're gonna learn one tool from this list, I would recommend it being Storyline 360, at least if your goal is to land opportunities in the corporate space or freelance spaces. Learning the tool, it's easy to moderate difficulty for common tasks. So for a lot of, you know, for probably 90% of what you would do in most instructional design roles, it's gonna be fairly easy to, yeah, moderate difficulty to pick up. You could probably do it anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks to do most of these basic tasks. But as you try to do more advanced programming and more complex custom interactions, it can get quite difficult quite fast as you get into variables, conditions, putting tons of triggers on a slide. So the skill ceiling is pretty high with this one. There are free tutorials and workshops on YouTube here on the channel or the paid Storyline Project Lab if you want more structure, guidance, and support. But the best approach to learn any of these tools on the list is to practice. So practice, practice, practice, dive into the tool, start building things, and just see what the experience is like rather than just watching tutorials and not actually practicing. So alternatives to Storyline 360 are Adobe Captivate, Domino, and the iSpring Suite. And there are many others. This is an e-learning development or e-learning authoring tool. So if you were interested in more alternatives, you could look those up. But if you wanna be, yeah, looking really appealing on the market, showing off some Storyline 360 skills on your portfolio is a very good idea. Next up is Articulate Rise 360. So Storyline and Rise are two different products. Rise is better at designing mobile-friendly e-learning experiences, and it's very quick and easy. So it's pretty templated. You can still create interactions, but it's kind of like pick the interaction you want and then swap out the text, swap out the images. So this one is super easy. It's also very popular. So a lot of corporate teams are using it because it is included in the Articulate 360 Suite. So it includes Rise, it includes Storyline. I also have a full video breaking down Articulate Storyline versus Articulate Rise. So you can decide which tool is best for which project. And I share my screen and show you examples and all of that good stuff. So check out that video if you're not clear on this distinction yet. Again, the best way to learn Rise because it is so easy is to just start practicing with the tool. So you can do your free trial, you can get some practice. And if there's something you're really stuck on, you could just Google it and look at Articulate's documentation for Rise. Some good alternatives for this one, for these mobile-friendly, easy-to-use authoring tools are Chameleon Creator. The design on Chameleon Creator is really, really good, very modern. It looks amazing and they have some pretty creative interactions. So check that one out. It's definitely gaining popularity. And then Evolve too, which a lot of like huge companies are starting to use. Probably a little bit steeper of a learning curve. I don't have a ton of experience with it myself, but check out Kath Ellis here on YouTube. I know she's been doing some really cool work with Evolve and I think she's gonna start creating tutorials on it soon. So stay tuned on that, but that is also a really good tool. All right, Adobe Illustrator. So now we're getting into the Adobe Suite. And I'm gonna share some alternatives for all these tools, but the Adobe Suite kind of lets you, or the Adobe Creative Cloud, I should say. That's what it's called at the moment. It has a bunch of different tools in it and they let you manipulate images, videos, graphics, all sorts of stuff. So we're gonna look at a few different Adobe tools, but I will have some lower cost alternatives if you're not in this ecosystem. So Illustrator is for editing vector graphics and creating graphics from scratch. And you can even develop entire job aids or infographics with this tool. So when I say vector graphics, usually those are like illustrated graphics. I have a full video on how to use Adobe Illustrator where I dive into vector graphics versus raster graphics. We're not gonna dive into that here, but this is the Adobe tool that I use more often than anything else when I was doing freelance client work. So this is a very good one to learn. It can be difficult to learn, but you don't need the advanced skills. So when I first got recommended to learn Illustrator, I'm like, okay. I spent probably one to two months going from beginner all the way up through advanced tutorials. I really dove deep into the tool. And then once I actually started doing e-learning design and development work, I used basically only what I learned in that beginner tutorial. So I way overdid it and it did get pretty difficult. But you could probably pick up the basics in like a day or so and do most of what you need to do. And again, check out that video that I created on Illustrator because I show exactly what an e-learning designer would need to know how to do with the tool. But there are also always great LinkedIn learning playlists for learning Illustrator. So check that out. I learned in an earlier version with someone named Deke McClelland, and that was a LinkedIn learning series. And then there are also really good tutorials on YouTube. The popular alternative here is Affinity Designer. And Affinity is like a much lower cost alternative to Adobe. You can do most of the same, pretty much all the same stuff as you can with the Adobe tools. But you pay for it once instead of having a subscription. And they have a few alternatives. But Affinity Designer is the alternative for Illustrator. All right, next up we have Photoshop. So this one is more for editing photos and photorealistic images. If you want an easy way to think about it, you can use Illustrator to edit these illustrated images and Photoshop to edit the photorealistic images. So there's some more nuance to it than that, but that's an easy way to think about it. Again, Photoshop is difficult to learn, but you could pick up the basic stuff more quickly. It's just a very, very powerful tool with a very high skill ceiling. And as an instructional designer or an e-learning developer, you don't really need that level of skill. Tons of tutorials on LinkedIn Learning and YouTube. And then the alternatives here are Affinity Photo or a program called GIMP, which is free. So Photoshop, I haven't used very much. I never did any like formal tutorials or anything like that. I kind of just piece stuff together as needed, maybe use a YouTube tutorial. Like when I knew that Photoshop was capable of something, but I didn't know how to do it yet. Yeah, I used Illustrator probably 10 times more than I use Photoshop. For designers who do a lot of work like with photorealistic images and assets, that may be flip-flopped. So both of these tools are good to know your way around in. Next up, we have Adobe XD. So this is a prototyping tool. So we use this to design visual mock-ups, design the layouts for your screens, and to even prototype some like simple interactions. Generally, most ideas don't do the prototyping in Adobe XD because we could just use a tool like Articulate Storyline. But yeah, I've used this and the people I work with use this to design the visual mock-ups and like piece everything together to see how it will look before bringing it into a tool like Articulate Storyline. The good news is that Adobe XD is a lot easier to learn and use than the other Adobe tools. So the idea is, yeah, make it quick and easy to put together these mock-ups and layouts. You can learn it via LinkedIn Learning or YouTube, just like the others. It's good, like learning the Adobe Suite tools is good because there are just so many content creators out there and so many resources to help with these tools. I do have a full video on how to use Adobe XD in your e-learning workflow here on the YouTube channel. So I will link that. But yeah, you could pick this one up probably. I mean, some people really don't like this tool, which is where alternatives come into play. And Figma is the most popular Adobe XD tutorial. At the time of recording this, Figma is free, but Adobe did recently acquire Figma, so we will see what they do with the pricing on that front. But two really good tools with basically the same function. And it's good to add a tool like this to your toolkit if you wanna design more professional layouts more quickly. Next up, the last Adobe tool we're gonna take a look at here is Adobe Premiere Pro. And this is what you use to edit videos. So nothing fancy, I mean, you can do pretty fancy stuff with this, but this is just a video editor. So if you need to add simple effects to videos or cut videos up and spin them back together or add animations, Premiere Pro can do that. After Effects can get way more intense with the animations and stuff, but again, Premiere Pro has been fine for all I've needed it for as an ID and e-learning developer. I'd say moderate difficulty to learn, maybe even easy difficulty. I think it depends. I mean, I grew up using tools like Windows Movie Maker and iMovie to use these like timeline-based video editors. So if you're comfortable with tools like that, you could pick up Premiere Pro very easily, at least for basic video editing. Same thing, it's an Adobe tool, so LinkedIn Learning and YouTube are great resources. And the most popular alternative here is TechSmith Camtasia. So Camtasia is easier to use probably, a bit more straightforward. Some people may prefer it, some teams may prefer it, but if you can use one of these video editors, you can pick up another video editor very easily. Okay, next up we have Canva. So this is an easy-to-use design tool with a very rich feature set, and they have a ton of funding. They're constantly rolling out new features. It seems like they're starting to try to take on Google Docs with some of their feature sets. Kind of a very all-in-one tool, and their main idea is to make design accessible to non-designers. So I haven't used this one too much. I got into the field using the Adobe Suite, but if you want a more accessible intro, and you don't wanna get your hands on with the Adobe tools yet, check out Canva. They have tons of templates that already look pretty good, and you can just swap things out. So it makes design much more accessible, but you're gonna be a bit more limited most likely than if you were using the Adobe Suite. If you wanna learn how to use this, Canva does have their own design school. That's just how they've branded their free resources and tutorials and all of that. So definitely check that out if you're trying to learn Canva. Now we're gonna move on a little bit. So that's all the design and the development tools. Now let's get into an LMS, which is Talent LMS. So this is a learning management system, and you use learning management systems to host e-learning packages, manage who can access those e-learning packages, and then review reports around who completed them, what scores they got, and all of that good stuff. So Talent LMS is just one of the easiest ones to learn, but it's the same kind of idea. Once you know how to use one LMS, you can probably pick up different ones quite easily because their feature sets are all quite similar. I do have a full YouTube video. I think it's called How to Use a Learning Management System, and we actually start a trial of Talent LMS and take a look at it together. So check that out. This is definitely a good thing to get your hands on with. If you are new to instructional design, you'll see this as a requirement in most job postings you look at. So learn via YouTube, Talent LMS documentation, or whatever LMS you're using's documentation, and then just practice. So you can do this in a day. You can get practice uploading an e-learning package, enrolling some people in it, and then accessing some reports, and that's basically the workflow. I mean, of course, it can get more complex, but you'll get the main idea pretty quickly if you watch that video I mentioned. The alternatives here are Docebo, Moodle, and Canvas, and probably 50 plus more. So there are so many. Talent LMS and Docebo are quite popular in the corporate space. Moodle is open source and has a bit steeper of a learning curve. And then Canvas and Blackboard are more popular in higher ed. Okay, moving right along. Vyond, great tool here. So you can use Vyond to create animated videos in your browser. But the best part about it is that it has this customizable cohesive asset library. So yeah, it's browser-based. It's a video, it functions as a video editor. You can upload your own assets to use, but that's not how most people use it. Most people use Vyond's asset library. So they have a few different art styles, and then you can just type in what you need, like a dog or a building or an office or a hospital or whatever it is. And they just have tons of assets that all look on-brand, cohesive. So you can do really powerful work with the combination of Vyond and a tool like Articulate Storyline. And you don't really need to do much graphics work because Vyond gives you most of the assets you need. So very easy to use and learn. And the best way to figure it out is just start a trial and learn by practicing. I mean, most people pick this up pretty easily. Of course, there are some advanced features and some advanced techniques you can use to make your videos more effective. And Vyond has plenty of tutorials to help you with this. So pretty easy to learn. Yeah, I would say give this one a go and you'll be able to pick it up without too much trouble. The most popular alternative I've heard of is PowToon, but I'm sure there are many others who follow this model of giving you an asset library and then letting you edit videos with the asset library. But Vyond is the best one that I've seen. And it's picking up a lot of steam in the instructional design and e-learning space. A lot of teams are using it. So good tool to show off your skills with. Next up, we have Snagit. So this one's pretty simple. You take screenshots and edit them quickly and easily. And the best way to learn is just by using it. So I had to include this one on here just because of how much time it saves. You can just press your print screen button. And then based on how you have it configured, like you can either like click and drag what you want to take a screenshot of. You can just click the whole screen and then it will instantly open it in an editor. And you can just like, you know, crop it very easily, add arrows to it, add text to it. So just a super easy way to like take and then edit and mock up screenshots like in an instance. So very good tool there. And it's pretty inexpensive. So it'll save you a lot of time if you grab that one. So yeah, so those are the 10 instructional design software, tools, technology, the 10 best ones, the 10 most popular ones. I'm going to include a bunch of links in the description for you to follow along. So check that out. If you would like me to create like videos on some of these tools that I don't already have videos for, like let me know. If I missed any tools, also let me know. So feel free to let us know. We'll keep an eye on the comments. I'm always happy to create more videos about the ID tech to help you out. And then if you're watching this because you'd like to become an instructional designer, then make sure you check out that full become an ID playlist because that's always growing and it's helped a lot of people get their first instructional design job. So thanks for making it to the end and I will see you in the next video.