If you’re trying to become an instructional designer, this article should give you a good idea of which tools to prioritize. And if you’re already an instructional designer, then this should give you some good ideas of how to focus on your professional development and upskilling.
Articulate Storyline 360
Articulate Storyline 360 it’s very flexible. It’s also the most popular tool in the industry, so this probably isn’t the first time you’ve heard about it. So Storyline is the most popular. 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 going to 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. So the skill ceiling is pretty high with this one.
Articulate Rise 360
Storyline and Rise are two different products. Rise is better at designing mobile-friendly eLearning experiences, and it’s very quick and easy. So it’s pretty templated. You can still create interactions, but it’s kind of like picking the interaction you want and then swapping out the text, swapping 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 and includes Storyline.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator. It has a bunch of different tools in it, and they let you manipulate images, videos, graphics, and all sorts of stuff. So Illustrator is for editing vector graphics and creating vet graphics from scratch. And you can even develop entire job aids or infographics with this tool. It can be difficult to learn, but you don’t need advanced skills. The popular alternative here is Affinity Designer, and Affinity is a much lower-cost alternative to Adobe. You can do most of the same, pretty much all the same stuff as you can with Adobe Tools, but you pay for it once instead of having a subscription they have a few alternatives, but Affinity Designer is the alternative for Illustrator.
Canva
Canva is an easy-to-use design tool with a very rich feature set and like 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 or some other feature sets. they have kind of a very all-in-one tool and their main idea is to make design accessible to non-designers. But if you want a more accessible intro and you don’t want to get your hands, get hands-on with the Adobe tools yet, check out Canva. They have tons of like templates that already look pretty good and you can just swap things out so it makes the design much more accessible, but you’re going to be a bit more limited, most likely than if you’re using the Adobe Suite.
TalentLMS
TalentLMS is a learning management system, and you use learning management systems to host eLearning packages, manage who can access those eLearning packages, and then review reports around like who completed them, what scores they got, and all of that good stuff. So TalentLMS is just one of the easiest ones to learn. But they are. . . 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. The alternatives here are Docebo, Moodle, Canvas, and probably 50-plus more. So there are so many. TalentLMS 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.
Vyond
Vyond is 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, and you can like upload your 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 like 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 need to do much graphics work because Vyond gives you most of the assets you need. So very easy to use and learn. And a lot of teams are using it, so good tool to show off your skills with.