Enabling Effective E-Learning Creation on a Large Scale: Special-Purpose Authoring Tools

E-learning design and development today relies more on technological tools than ever before. In today’s world, for budget and efficiency reasons, e-learning is often created by people without a technical background, using the authoring tools that are available to them. While this process is in some ways unavoidable, the result is that e-learning design is often dictated as much by the capabilities of existing authoring tools as by educational and design principles. In order to support the creation of more sophisticated, effective, educationally-sound e-learning on a large scale, I suggest an approach based on “special-purpose” authoring tools, designed around pedagogical models in a way that encourages good design and speeds up development. In this paper, I describe that approach and provide a brief example of the approach in use.