Comprehensive commercial office suites, for example, can cost hundreds of dollars. Even with student discounts, many may not be able to afford the pricey proprietary software needed to do schoolwork. Free online and downloadable office suites provide an excellent alternative. Using online word processors, spreadsheet and presentation tools can also aid group learning projects. Students can create and share accounts with their peers, allowing rich and asynchronous collaboration on projects.
eLearning tools should also be easy enough for the novice to use and have a short learning curve, says the Brandon Hall Group. An uncluttered what-you-see-is-what-you-get -- WYSIWYG -- interface and widely used operations such as drag-and-drop and single- or double-clicking allow students to dive right in and focus on the learning activities at hand. One free and popular web-based presentation tool actually scaffolds the process of creating a presentation in three easy steps from brainstorming to organizing and staging. Users easily engage in higher order analytical and creative thinking for learning without having to struggle with the application.
Being freely available, easy and intuitive to use isn't enough, though. Students value feature-rich applications. Easily downloadable PDF readers, for example, host a range of tools that promote active reading and study. Not only can students highlight and annotate any texts saved as PDF files, they can also attach files, embed images and create paths to audio and video files. These tools are especially useful for marking up sources for use in research writing.
Finally, being Web based provides many benefits. Students and teachers can access such tools from laptops and even tablets or smart phones from wherever they may be. Further, Web-based tools can host extremely large file sizes, making it easy to both upload and watch video tutorials, for example. Online forum and blogging software allows students to participate in ongoing conversations in an asynchronous way, making class discussions convenient for all.