Development and Evaluation of an Authoring Tool Taxonomy

The task of choosing an authoring tool for creating digital instructional materials is becoming complex, since the amount of possibilities is daily increasing. In this sense, this paper presents the development and the evaluation of an authoring tool taxonomy made in compliance with the ANSI/NISO Z39.19 international standard. The taxonomy was classified over 400 tools and was published on a Web site. It was evaluated by 135 professionals of distance learning communities through a questionnaire. The results showed the validity and the usefulness of the taxonomy and pointed out the pertinence of the classification strategy.