Best Free Course Authoring Tools

If your goal is to create a great digital course that is comprehensive and contains real educational value for anyone who takes it, then something that can make life a lot easier is a good course authoring tool.

Course authoring tools are pieces of software designed to help educators, lecturers, and content creators ideate, produce, and assemble a wide variety of digital content for educational or information purposes. In simplest terms, it’s software that helps you put together a comprehensive digital course or curriculum for any given field.

That said, there are plenty of these tools out there, some of which are free and some of which are not. You’re probably thinking that the free tools aren’t worth your time, but this isn’t always the case. So, let’s get to it and find the best free course authoring tools that the market has to offer.

What to Look for in a Course Authoring Tool

Just to get you started, here are a few of the most important considerations to keep in mind when choosing a free course authoring tool.

• User-friendliness
• Engagement features
• Level of interactivity
• Compatibility with LMS
• Ease and degree of customization
• Mobile responsiveness
• Ease of collaboration
• AI-driven features – such as AI quiz creation

The 10 Best Free Course Authoring Tools

Let’s take a quick look at each of the top ten best free course authoring tools, what they have to offer, and why you might want to use them to generate the best piece of digital learning material.

1. Coursebox

Coursebox.ai is a high level artificial intelligence assisted course creation application that takes your simple files and turns them into fully usable courses that anyone can easily learn from.

Features

• Coursebox allows you to quickly convert files such as videos, documents, and websites into functional courses.
• AI is used to grade students and provide them with instant feedback, to tutor students in real-time throughout the course, and more.
• Using information about your course, Coursebox uses AI to automatically generate quizzes and tests,
• The AI course designer helps you brainstorm and structure a course, and then sell it too.

Cost

• Basic Plan: Free
• Creator Yearly: $17 Monthly
• Expert Yearly: $42 Monthly
• LXP Insanity: $1083 Monthly

2. Ispring

With hundreds of positive customer reviews, Ispring is viewed as one of the top eLearning course authoring tools out there right now, and it has a great free plan to start with.

Features

• Use the AI assistant to generate ideas for courses, write valuable guides, and even create full-scale quizzes and tests in mere minutes.
• Any PPT presentations you may have can be easily converted into functional online and mobile-ready courses.
• Quizzes can be built using 14 different question templates, along with versatile branching and scoring methods. There are over 90,000 ready-made course templates available.
• Ispring makes it easy to combine videos with course slides for an enhanced learning experience.
• Use Ispring to create professional voice overs to teach your course for you.

Cost

• Free Trial Available
• Prices vary from $470 to $1,970 Monthly depending on whether you go with any one of the business, freelancer, or academic plans.

3. H5P

H5P is a simple course authoring tool based on HTML5. It’s a great tool because it allows users to easily add text, multiple choice questions, fill in the blanks, and other types of course content using nothing more than a web browser, allowing users to create comprehensive courses without the need for technical knowledge.

Features

• Create rich HTML5  Content in a variety of existing publishing platforms.
• Easily share all of your content and courses across any site that is H5P compatible.
• All content can be modified and reused in your browser whenever you see fit.
• Courses can be fully customized with visuals and text as you see fit.

Cost

• Starting Price: Free

4. Edapp

Edapp is known as one of the best mobile learning management solutions in the world, designed as a totally free all-in-one learning solution for educators of all kinds.

Features

• Create easy and great-looking courses without any designing or coding experience required.
• Use AI to help get past roadblocks and allow it to help you generate ideas for your courses.
• There are over 80 course templates to choose from, to make course creation fast and easy.
• Courses can be designed using all of the latest learning strategies and trends, so learners can more easily grasp the information that you are sharing.
• With a plethora of customization options, you can get your digital courses looking exactly the way you want them to.

Cost

• Free Version
• Pro Version - $2.95 Monthly Per User
• Managed Pro – Up to $5.95 Monthly Per User
• Enterprise – Custom Pricing

5. Coassemble

The authoring tool available from Coassemble is designed for a plethora of purposes, with designing digital educational courses being just one of them. It contains a plethora of features designed to make creating online courses as fast and easy as possible.

Features

• WYSIWYG  functionality and a simple user interface make creating flashcards, quizzes, guides, and training videos simple.
• Courses can be highly customized in terms of appearance to suit the course, brand, and educational topic at hand.
• A comprehensive library of themes, templates, and media is available for use. Coassemble also excels at creating highly interactive courses.
• Use the AI assistant to create quizzes quickly, by letting it pull important information from your courses.

Cost

• Starter: Free
• Business: $10 Monthly Per Member
• Enterprise: Custom Pricing

6. Udutu

Udutu is a totally free course authoring tool that is ideal for creating lessons, quizzes, tests, and so much more. 

Features

• Easy to use theme builder
• Advanced course builder with a simple interface
• Easily convert PPT into SCORM format
• Use pre-built templates to create various branching scenarios

Cost

• Try it for free! 

7. Courseau

If you need a platform that can easily take your existing content and easily convert it into online courses that are engaging and easy to follow along with, Courseau makes for another one of the best free course authoring tools around.

Features

• Start by providing files or an outline, along with the desired outcome for your students, and create courses from links, videos, files, and more.
• Outlines and lesson plans can be created manually or generated using sophisticated systems.
• Users can manually rearrange and organize course content, and personalize lessons with audio, images, video, and other types of media, plus add your own logo too.
• Use the Courseau software to easily generate key takeaways, examples, and quizzes, without having to do any of the heavy lifting.
• Courseau features dynamic SCORM integration along with an analytics dashboard.

Cost

• Free trial available
• Basic: $99 Monthly
• Enterprise: $299 Monthly  

8. Compozer

Compozer is a fully comprehensive suite that features a variety of tools designed to help anyone and everybody make fast and effective eLearning courses.

Features

• Choose from a massive variety of pre-designed templates to get started.
• Use pre-built blocks from the extensive Compozer library to create courses.
• Compozer allows users to add many interactive elements to create a richer learning experience full of media. There is a custom and royalty-free image library, combined with custom fonts, and so much more.
• This system also specializes in creating course content that is easily accessible on mobile devices.
• Lessons can then be easily exported to many SCORM packages and made ready for various LMS.

Cost

• Freemium: Free
• Freelancer: $99 Monthly Per User
• Enterprise: Custom Pricing

9. CourseLab

CourseLab is a super simple yet powerful authoring tool for eLearning purposes. The WYSIWYG environment doesn’t require users to know how to code or program, so high-quality and interactive course content can be published on websites, in LMS, on CDs, and on devices too.

Features

• Users are not required to know programming or HTML.
• The authoring environment looks like PowerPoint, so it’s familiar and easy to use, along with a module structure that lets users generate slides with ease.
• There is an embedded rich text editor to format text, as well as the ability to drag-and-drop objects wherever they are needed.
• CourseLab features some of the most comprehensive media support available.
• Tests can also be created with ease, such as single questions, multiple choice, fill in the blank, and much more. Scaled tests can be created using an objective scoring system. 

Cost

Version 2.4 is free, although there are newer versions that come in at various prices.

10. IsEazyAuthor

If you need a complete tool for creating, editing, and sharing digital learning courses in a fast, easy, and cost-effective way, the IsEazyAuthor is an option worth looking at, and it is in fact one of the highest rated course authoring tools out there.

Features

• Use a plethora of project templates to help you through the design process.
• IsEasy allows you to make two types of courses, those with vertical navigation and those with horizontal.
• Backgrounds, images, fonts, and more all allow for easy color management, plus there are many professional-looking corporate fonts available.
• The WYSIWYG editor means that the finished course will look exactly as it did during the editing phase.
• Courses are fully responsive on all devices.
• The collaborative editing features allows multiple users to edit courses at once.
• Use artificial intelligence to translate course content, to create test questions, to generate exercises and games, to create videos with avatars, and so much more!

Cost

• Free Version
• Professional: $80 Monthly
• Business: $208 Monthly
• Enterprise: Custom Pricing

Final Thoughts on the Best Free Course Authoring Tools 

As long as you find a free course authoring tool that lets you easily convert your content into full-scale, comprehensive, and usable lessons, then we encourage you to try any one of the tools listed above. The best ones of the day feature generative AI to help make the course creation process much faster and easier, they make your courses easy to customize, and they make your lessons look phenomenal too! 

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