Posted by Rapid learning tools come to the rescue when course content must be developed fast and economically, and when you may not have the highly technical expertise required to work with comprehensive authoring tools. While a traditional e-learning development project can take several months, the aim of rapid e-learning is to build and roll out content modules within weeks.
Many of these tools work by treating each PowerPoint slide as a learning object and then adding interactive elements like quizzes and tests between those slides. So a person who has sound knowledge of PowerPoint can easily start creating courses with these tools.
However, with the proliferation of various kinds of devices with different form factors, the inevitable question we have to ask is: Do rapid learning tools give responsive HTML 5.0 output?
To put things in perspective, we must understand what responsive design or output is. Basically, it is a form of web design that is intuitive in nature; it adjusts itself to best fit the device that it appears on. For smartphones and new devices, HTML5 is becoming almost a de-facto industry standard because besides making it faster, easier, and more economical to deploy web-based applications that perform like software and work across all platforms, HTML5 content is easier to interpret by different search engines and screen readers.
Many rapid e-learning authoring tools like Adobe Captivate 8, Adapt Learning, Composica 6, Camtasia Studio 8, Lectora Inspire, etc. do enable the course author to create responsive content for various desktops and most mobile devices (with Camtasia Studio 8 being only for Windows and Mac).
However, things get a little complicated when we talk of mobile devices as eLearning courses that are published in HTML5 using rapid authoring tools may not be fully responsive to mobile devices, unless the author has a good command on HTML5, CSS3, JQuery (UI), and JavaScript to understand the course layout structure. For example, to develop a truly responsive course in Lectora, the source code of the published course has to be tweaked with the addition of tags from the aforementioned languages, besides other things like addition of JQuery data-roles.
For rapid authoring tools to be fully responsive, we just have to wait and watch for features HTML5 to roll out more improvements to cater to various devices in the coming year.