Instructional designers keep reporting the same thing: 40+ hours to convert existing materials into an online course. Not because the content is hard. Because the tools are.
Go look at Upwork right now. Companies are paying $35-60/hour for freelancers to build courses in Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate. An entire freelance industry exists just to operate course authoring software. That tells you everything.
Two Extremes, Nothing in Between
Edtech content authoring has settled into two extremes, and both are bad.
On one end: Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, Lectora. Powerful, sure, but the learning curve is measured in weeks. These are design applications. A teacher who wants to put their lesson online shouldn't have to learn a new profession.
On the other end: built-in LMS course builders with drag-and-drop and three templates. Quick to learn, almost useless beyond basic text-and-video slides. A FreshLearn review of LearnUpon nailed it: "If you were hoping for an all-in-one solution where you can author sophisticated interactive content directly in the LMS, you'll be disappointed."
So teachers get to choose: learn a complex authoring suite, or accept that their online course will look like a 2010 PowerPoint.
The Thing Nobody Talks About: The Text Editor
Forget interactive simulations and branching scenarios. The biggest pain point is the most basic tool in the entire platform: the rich text editor. The thing teachers use to write assignment instructions, create content, and give feedback.
Tubetorial put it bluntly: "The rich text editor is the most frequently used interface in an LMS, making a frustrating authoring experience a primary and often overlooked driver of instructor churn."
The specific frustrations are mundane but infuriating:
Paste formatting chaos. Teachers copy text from Word documents and Google Docs constantly. Editors that "fail to clean mangled formatting from pasted Word or Google Docs content force instructors into time-consuming manual fixes." What should be a simple paste operation turns into a 20-minute reformatting exercise.
Limited formatting options. Many built-in editors support basic bold/italic/lists but lack tables, proper image placement, text alignment, or consistent heading styles. Teachers resort to screenshots of formatted documents because the editor can't reproduce what they need.
No collaboration. When multiple teachers work on shared course materials, they're typically editing documents externally and re-uploading. The LMS editor is a solo tool in an increasingly collaborative profession.
It's Not Creating Content. It's Converting It.
That 40-hour number isn't about writing new material. It's the time spent converting existing stuff (lesson plans, handouts, rubrics, worksheets that a teacher has been refining for years) into whatever format the LMS demands.
The content is already good. It just lives in Word docs, PDFs, and Google Docs. Getting it into the LMS without destroying it requires:
- Opening the source document
- Copying content section by section (because full-document paste destroys formatting)
- Manually reformatting headers, lists, tables, and images
- Re-linking any embedded resources
- Testing the result on both desktop and mobile
- Repeating for every lesson in the course
Multiply this by a teacher's entire course catalog, and you understand why the task is measured in weeks, not hours.
The Market Knows This Is Broken
In late 2025, LearnUpon acquired Courseau, an AI-powered course creation tool. The signal is clear: the problem is big enough that companies are buying their way to a solution because their built-in tools aren't cutting it.
AI-assisted content creation is a promising direction. Generate a first draft from a description, then let the teacher refine. But the catch is this: if the AI generates content into a limited editor, you've just moved the bottleneck. The editor itself has to be capable enough for the refinement step to not be painful.
The Middle Ground Exists
The sweet spot between "learn Articulate" and "three templates" isn't complicated. It's just rarely prioritized.
Clean paste handling. When a teacher pastes from Word, the editor should preserve the structure (headings, lists, tables) and strip the invisible junk (font overrides, spacing hacks, proprietary styles). This one feature would save more teacher time than anything else on this list.
Real formatting options. Tables, aligned images, headings, blockquotes, links, text styling. These aren't advanced features. They're the building blocks of every lesson plan ever written. They should be on a toolbar, not hidden behind a markup language.
Collaborative editing. Two teachers co-developing a course should be able to edit the same document at the same time, the way Google Docs works, but inside the platform. Not the current workflow of "I'll edit, upload, then you download and edit."
Import what you already have. Accept a .docx or .pdf and convert it into editable content with formatting mostly intact. It doesn't need to be pixel-perfect. It needs to be 80% right so the teacher isn't rebuilding from scratch.
Templates that actually match how teachers work. A research essay is different from a lab report is different from a creative writing prompt. Pre-built templates with appropriate rubrics and structures put teachers closer to their end goal from the start.
The Real Metric
The question isn't "what can this authoring tool do?" It's "how long does it take to go from idea to published assignment?"
If the answer is hours, the tool is failing. If it's minutes, it's working. A teacher shouldn't need to hire a freelancer or spend a weekend reformatting existing materials. Open the platform, type or paste, publish. Same session.