9 Instructional Design Software for Making Awesome Courses & How Not to Pick the Average Stuff

ey! 👋 Welcome to the best blog dedicated to picking the right instructional design software.

We mean it because we've been in your shoes and walked in them. We've gone from being students who learned from boring teachers and crappy software to people who simply know where to find the best stuff and have made one ourselves.

This blog isn't about how EducateMe got started, though we enjoy sharing our "aha moments" with like-minded individuals who genuinely care about quality education. Today, we're going to talk about the best instructional design software. Oh, and how to find your perfect fit without getting burned. 

In recent years, the use of online courses for education and training has grown in popularity. Competition has also heated up. Therefore, instructional designers desire immersive content, audio, and videos that can captivate the masses. There are currently over 94,000 of these creators employed in the US, so utilizing instructional designer software is a no-brainer if you wish to remain at the top of your game.

However, as an educator who has only recently begun administering online courses, you are likely at a loss for the best platform. And if you're a rising player, we're sure you'd like to join the top 10%... Phew, that's not an easy feat! 😅 But don't stress. We are here to help you. 

Here is a carefully crafted list of the elearning software for instructional design, guaranteed to get you off to a flying start:

1. EducateMe - costs an active user $2.5 per month.
2. iSpring Suite - costs 970€ per year for one author, with discounts for additional authors. 
3. Lectora - pricing ranges between $999 and $1,999 depending on the software's features. 
4. Articulate 360 - offers a free trial and a monthly plan of $1399 per user. 
5. Aptly - provides a free trial and a customized plan. Price is per request. 
6. TalentLMS- offers six distinct subscriptions ranging in price from free to custom. 
7. WhatFix - we're sorry, but you'll need to request a quote 🫤
8. ProProf LMS - monthly cost of $1 per learner and annual billing. 
9. Brainshark - provides pro and premium memberships... The sales team is privy to pricing information.
   

The rest of this article discusses these software in depth, analyzing their characteristics and benefits. Want to learn more about them? Let's jump in.

What is an Instructional Design Tool?

Instructional design software is any software instructional designers use to create eLearning content to facilitate learning. The content comes in different forms, such as texts, podcasts, images, videos, and others. Instructional design software are invaluable tools for achieving instructional and learning goals. They make the life of an eLearning designer much easier.

So, who is an instructional designer? 🤔

Instructional designers are basically individuals who create e-learning courses. They perform tasks such as curriculum development, course redesign, and creating training content for students and professionals.

Benefits of Instructional Design Software 🧰 

Tools for Instructional design have helped transform the way people learn and boost performance after learning. They enhance the learning process by making it highly engaging, interactive, and efficient.

According to research, e-learning courses developed with instructional design tools can increase knowledge retention. It has also been shown to deliver improved persuasive communication and inspire learners to strive for more knowledge. One key benefit of using instructional design is that it provides a means to understand your learners more and know how best they can learn. It also makes you understand the specific knowledge or skills learners should acquire at the end of the course.

• ✅ Immersive learning experience - As indicated earlier in this blog post, software for instructional designer have significantly improved the way trainers create content and how it is presented. They help create an immersive learning experience by engaging the senses and stimulating interaction with elements such as videos, images, audio, charts, etc. Such a learning process boosts the imagination and creative skills of learners. With continuously improving technology, the immersive learning experience these tools can deliver will only get better.
• ✅ Personalized Training - Trainers use the numerous tools provided by instruction design software programs to create personalized training for individuals or groups. Learning goals are easily achieved when a learning method is tailored to specific learners' needs. Personalized training is especially useful for employee training. Many organizations have used instruction design software programs to create personalized training for their workforce.
• ✅ On-demand learning - The way people want to learn is rapidly changing. With On-demand learning, learners can access knowledge at any time and from anywhere and acquire knowledge at their own pace. This learning method uses content delivered through podcasts, videos, eLearning courses, etc. The most important consideration in any learning method is how effectively the content is delivered. In the post-pandemic era, the human resource department of many organizations has shown a preference for on-demand training to achieve their learning and development goals. Instructional design software is key to creating excellent on-demand courses for diverse purposes.
• ✅ Bite-sized learning - With instructional designer software, eLearning content can be broken down into easily understood smaller parts or modules. Bite-sized learning is more convenient as it gives learners the freedom to learn at a suitable pace, one step at a time. eLearning designers use this knowledge to create highly effective courses.

Best Instructional Design Software to Build Courses & Engage Your Students

There is a lot of software for instructional design in the market. To create engaging and interactive courses, you need to consider the different features each of them offers. We have compiled a list of some of the leading instructional design software training platforms with their features to help you choose the best fit for your needs.

#1. EducateMe

EducateMe provides some of the best instructional designer tools that facilitate effective eLearning. They offer all the features that help educators build a solid learning infrastructure for cohort-based courses. EducateMe's live communication promotes collaborative thinking and allows you to create a learning experience of excellent interactivity and sustained engagement for your learners.

Why We Love EducateMe 🥰

• Live Sessions - Loss of communication is a major problem that hinders the flow of online learning. The live session feature offered by EducateMe eliminates that problem and ensures you don't lose communication with participants.
• Analytics and Stats - If learners' stats are important, you will find this powerful feature useful. You can easily analyze the performance of your learners and track their respective progress through EducateMe's analytics tools. The tools put all your learners' stats right in front of you. With accurate metrics and timely support, your training experience becomes much easier and more enjoyable.
• Feedback tools - With many feedback tools, you can receive quick feedback from learners about your training. This timely feedback helps you respond swiftly and improve your training resources and the education process.
• Meetings recordings - The platform allows you to record your classes and automatically saves the lesson materials for future reference. You can easily access all your previous classes with unlimited storage space available.
• Messenger - This advanced messaging feature increases interaction with your students and enhances learning. You can create channels for different groups and send direct messages to each learner.
• Notion integration -  The marrying of EducateMe and Notion makes it a robust custom instructional design solution. With the help of this integration, you can create well-designed content. Notion does a good job of organizing information, and this organization is easy to move to the EducateMe platform. To top it off, you can use different ways of putting things together. You can build your courses using different tools, such as boards, tables, pages, calendars, and templates. Once that's done, you can add these custom structures to the rest of your lesson.

#2. Ispring Suite

iSpring Suite is designed to aid eLearning designers in developing training content in PowerPoint. Surveys, Assessments, quizzes, and other interactive features can be imported and embedded seamlessly into Powerpoint with this instructional design tool. Your voiceovers are easily added to the content, making the screencasting feature easy to use. iSpring Suite allows you to convert your old word documents, PDFs, and Powerpoints into new ebooks.

What We Loved about iSpring Suite 😍

Video lectures: You can easily combine your lecture videos with slides to get an enhanced video that delivers more.

eLearning interactions: With 14 interactive and beautiful templates available, your content can be presented in a more attractive way to increase engagement with learners.

Video editor - The powerful video editor allows you to trim and merge unlimited videos. You can also add music, graphics, transitions, and titles to your videos.

Content Library - iSpring offers numerous images and ready-made templates to help you create great courses with only a few clicks. This content library saves you time and energy and delivers good results.

Text-to-speech - You can create high-quality, professional voiceovers for your courses in 42 languages. With this feature, you reach and impact more people in different parts of the world by speaking to them in the language they understand.

#3. Lectora Publisher

Lectora Publisher is a cloud-based instructional design tool that creates interactive eLearning courses. From its rich collection of resources, you can extract and use varieties of templates, stock images, and characters for your courses. The ability to create multi-device courses is a key feature of Lectora.

What We Loved about Lectora Publisher 😍

• BranchTrack - BranchTrack feature allows you to create engaging branching scenarios that improve learning. Branching scenarios are paths in learning content that aid a learner's decision-making. It presents the consequences based on actions taken by a learner. Scenario-based learning is particularly beneficial in training employees. BranchTrack scenarios can be created, edited, and inserted into your course in a few minutes.
• Text to Speech - Convert your text to a clear voice. You can choose from numerous male or female voices producing native language tones for Italian, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish, among others. With the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), you can use simple text to add pronunciation, pauses, and word emphasis.
• Course Conversion - This feature allows you to convert the non-responsive titles of your existing courses to responsive course design (RCD) with three clicks and make suitable adjustments for specific devices.
• Storyboard: Lectora is one of the best instructional design storyboard software. A storyboard is a graphic representation of how your courses will unfold, shot by shot. It could be a video made of clips with illustrations or pictures representing each shot, with notes about what's going on in the scene and what's being said in the script during that shot.

#4. Articulate 360

Articulate 360 helps eLearning designers create simple and beautiful course content. You can choose to start building from scratch or make use of the numerous built-in templates, graphics, themes, and characters they provide. They focus on course creation for workplace learning.

What We Loved about Articulate 360 😍

• Creator tools - With hundreds of templates on diverse topics, an eLearning designer can quickly create a course. The creator tools also provide easy-to-use interactive activities, tests, and quizzes to sufficiently engage your learners.
• Course assets - With a library with over 9 million course assets, including videos, characters, icons, and other interactive elements, your course creation is significantly easier.
• Online stakeholder reviews - This feature allows you to get course reviews from stakeholders faster and easier. Stakeholders can give their feedback through a web browser without downloading an app.

#5. Apty

Apty is an Instructional Design software that provides the tool L&D professionals can use to create highly interactive content for corporate training. The software also aids employees in acquiring knowledge by performing learning activities in real time.

Why Apty is Cool 😎 

• Pain points Identification - Aptly helps you pinpoint the areas where your employees are having challenges or difficulties without needing guesswork.
• Content Conversion - You can easily convert your created content into Videos, PDFs, Permalinks, etc. 
• Automation - You can get those mundane tasks automated to valuable time and energy and allow your employees to focus on more productive tasks

#6. TalentLMS

TalentLMS is a platform that offers many ready-made courses that cover the soft skills employees need to excel in the workplace. With TalentLMS, you can start training your team as soon as you get them on board. 

Why Talentlms is Cool 😎 

• Content-friendly - You can create powerful courses from scratch using all forms of media, including docs, presentations, and videos. You also have the option to reuse your already created content.
• Assessments engine - Increase interactivity by building different tests with options for fill-in-the-blank, ordering, open-ended, drag-and-drop matching, and multiple-choice questions.
• Surveys engine - Surveys help you understand your learners and how they get along with your training. With TalentLMS survey engines, you can send and receive learners' responses in a single spot.
• Learning paths - Guide your learners' progress by limiting the mode of course completion or how they can view the course content.

#7. Whatfix

Whatfix is designed to help trainers build interactive course content in real-time and with in-app guidance. The in-app guidance feature engages employees step-by-step and notifies them of specific tasks to perform on the platform.

Whatfix focuses on employee training and uses a software application's live environment to aid learning as learners carry out tasks.

Why Whatfix is Cool 😎 

• Easy-to-create interactive walkthroughs - Whatfix offers easy and fast creation for interactive walkthroughs, making it an efficient instructional design workflow software. You can create a 10-step walkthrough in about 10 minutes.
• Self-Help - Employees receive relevant in-app guidance through the self-help widget whenever needed.

#8. ProProfs LMS

ProProfs LMS is a cloud LMS with an eLearning authoring tool to create course content and tests. ProProfs LMS gives you a platform to train people at any time using their virtual classroom.

Why You May Like ProProfs LMS 🤞 

• Easy to use - ProProfs LMS is designed to be used by people with all levels of skills. You don't need any technical knowledge to use the platform effectively.
• Customizable Courses - With a library of over 100 ready-to-use, professionally made, and customizable courses, you can make a complete course in no time.
• Mobile-ready - Learners can easily access the platform from various mobile devices, operating systems, and browsers.

#9. Brainshark

Brainshark is design software that your employees can use to create all forms of presentations, including PDFs, PowerPoint, charts, web pages, and others. The cloud-based software empowers your teams with excellent presentation insights and skills required to deliver consistently high performance.

Why You May Like Brainshark 🤞

• Machine Analysis & Scoring - You can improve your video coaching process using Brainshark's AI-powered engine to perform analysis and get feedback.
• Larger File Upload - You don't have to worry about your large files not uploading. With Brainshark, your larger file can be easily uploaded as documents, PowerPoint, or videos.
• Image Library - Choose from over 500 beautiful royalty-free images to make your presentation more powerful.

How to Choose the Software for Instructional Design (a.ka. weeding out the bad guys 🥷 )

Choosing the right software instructional design to create eLearning courses is never easy, especially if you are new to the course creation business. Whether you're looking for the best free instructional design software or a custom solution, the points below will help you make a perfect choice.

• Take A Closer Look At Your Own Cognitions - Evaluating how you learn and understand course materials is vital to selecting the right Instructional design software. Self-assessment could help identify how the learning design software can be used to meet the needs of learners. If a learning feature offered by a particular software is complicated for you to understand, it is highly possible it would be the same for prospective course participants. Using Instructional Design Software with features that align with your cognitive skills is best. This evaluation will allow you to create a far more effective course.
• Use Your Learning Objectives As A Reference Point - Does the instructional design software have the tools to make your learning objectives easy for learners to achieve? This is a critical question you need to answer before making a choice. Check if the software will be useful for creating different question types (not only multiple-choice and true/false questions but also drag-and-drop, hotspot, fill-in-the-blank, and other types). Does the tool have a feedback message feature for your learners? The feedback feature helps set up testing rules according to your learning objectives.
• Evaluate EVERY Aspect of the Instructional Design Model - The instructional design model helps educators or trainers plan the course design process from step to step. The right instructional design software must have the tools necessary to deliver the appropriate learner-focused instructions for every aspect of the instructional design model. A thorough evaluation of the Instructional Design Model will guide against selecting the wrong software.
• Get Input from Your eLearning Team - Seeking the input of your team members is a vital step required to make the right choice in acquiring the right instructional design software. Experienced team members could bring other significant points of consideration to your notice. They may suggest you consider factors like technical support, pricing, mobile-friendliness, asset library, and others before deciding on the instructional design software that will best serve your needs.

Conclusion

With EducateMe's powerful designer tools for every aspect of the instructional design model, the overall ease of use, and the reliable technical support offered, they stand out for creating engaging and interactive eLearning courses.