An instructional design (ID) software is useful in ensuring that the ID process is effective, easy and efficient. However, before picking up tools, it is important to analyze and understand your instructional design process and it’s basic requirements.

What is instructional design?

By definition, Instructional Design is the process of planning and implementing a training system in workplace or for general education.

Many frameworks exist for instructional design. This includes Merrill’s Principles of Instruction, Gagne’s Nine Events of Instructions, and Bloom’s Taxonomy, but the most popular ID model is ADDIE.

ADDIE stands for analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation, which is the suggested process for this model.

Generally, instructional design process is needed in both online and offline training. And for online training, instructional design softwares are wildly used. For this reason, we will concentrate on online instructional design softwares in this article.

Uses of instructional design softwares

On a practical note, ID starts with analysis and evaluation of your, 1) target audience, 2) learning requirements and 3) learning outcomes. Thereafter, learning objectives, lesson plans and assessment strategies are defined. Once this is done, the SME prepares the content.

After that, in the development phase, the instructional designer prepares the storyboard based on the learning content. Subsequently, the developers converts the storyboard into an eLearning course.

Finally comes the implantation phase, where the course is uploaded to a learning management system (LMS) and launched for the users.

Until recently, desktop softwares like Microsoft powerpoint and excel were used in the analysis phase for developing the plans and content. The same tools are used for preparing storyboards as well. For course development, elearning authoring tools are wildly used.

Instructional design software recommendations

Even though there are a number of softwares available in the market, choosing an all-in-one ID software would make the process more efficient and help you save time and money.

For this reason, choose tools that support efficient storyboard development, quick and automated course development, and easy publishing options.

Wizcabin is an instructional design software, that 1) support automated course authoring, 2) provides HTML5 output and 3) supports easy development assessment. Besides, Wizcabin comes with a bundled storyboard tool.

One of the most popular feature of Wizcabin is its eLearning automation capability that supports automatic eLearning course creation from storyboards.

Because of the automation capabilities, Wizcabin will help you save a lot of time and money developing online courses.

The simple user interface, and automation capabilities, make Wizcabin an easy-to-use tool that every member of the L &D team can use to develop courses, irrespective of their technical or design skills. You can check for some eLearning example courses created with Wizcabin here

Content and storyboard development

One of the key recommended features of an instructional design software is its capability to import text documents and storyboards. With Wizcabin, you can import text documents to its storyboard interface.

And the software, in turn, will automatically convert your document into an interactive eLearning course.

Creating interactivity with instructional design software

In order to make online courses engaging and effective, it is very important to add interactivity and animations in your online course. Firstly, interactivity increases the learner’s curiosity and help him/her engage with the content. Interactivity also helps you to create a feedback loop, that will be useful in assessing the seat time and in making improvements.

Wizcabin allows you to create interactive elements like flip buttons, drop-downs, and pop-ups. Moreover, you can create these interactivities without any coding or design expertise: Wizcabin automatically creates these interactive elements from your storyboard.

Creating complex actions like, a branching scenario and interactive quizzes are also easy with Wizcabin. Versatile interactive options, and automation tools makes Wizcabin a very powerful instructional design software.

Assessments

Assessments are one of the key elements of all instructional design strategies. Most importantly, in order to evaluate and assess the effectiveness of your courses you need to add quizzes, interactive activities and assessment exercises all through your learning path.

Therefore, while choosing your instructional design software, ensure that the tool provides assessment tools with an easy to use interface and reports.

Wizcabin has inbuilt assessments tools like quizzes, multiple choice questions, and image/video based assessments. Above all, Wizcabin allows you to create the assessment exercises automatically from storyboard documents. More over, creating custom assessment exercises are very easy with Wizcabin.

Multimedia integration

Nowadays, thanks to the bandwidth revolution, videos have become a very popular eLearning trend. Videos, audio, and animations make your courses richer and more engaging.

Therefore, the capability to add multimedia to your courses has become one of the most important features of instructional design software.

Wizcabin provides seamless integration with Youtube. With Wizcabin it’s easy to enrich your courses with video and audio. More over, you can easily add voice over to your text and easily synchronize your animations with audio.

Responsive courses

Wizcabin courses are device-ready. In other words, Wizcabin output is a responsive course that suites any devices. This means that, if you create courses in Wizcabin, you don’t need to make any extra effort to ensure that your courses works with all devices.

Wizcabin’s inbuilt courses building mechanism automatically creates a responsive HTML5 course output.

SCORM

Your eLearning courses should work in any learning management system, and SCORM ensures this. With Wizcabin you can publish your courses as HTML files, stand-alone files for viewing in PC and also as a SCORM file.

This means that, when you use Wizcabin, you don’t need to worry about whether your course will work with your LMS. Courses created with Wizcabin works well in all SCROM compliant learning management systems.

Updates

How often are you going to make updates to your course? One of the key factors to consider while choosing an instructional design software is its ability to easily update your course.

If your instructional design software takes as much time as creating a course to make updates, this may not be a good choice.

Wizcabin’s simple and easy to use interface ensures that you can update your courses anytime, quickly.