The ID Toolbox

The ID Toolbox is a growing set of free, single-purpose utilities for the parts of instructional design that are tedious rather than creative. Nothing requires an account or an email, and the tools that read your files run entirely in the browser, so a draft course never has to be uploaded anywhere.

What you can do with it

Before you build: choose between authoring tools against weighted criteria, test whether the request really needs a course at all, estimate development time and cost from complexity and finished minutes, count course words for a translation quote, or recover the storyboard, questions and media from a published course when the source file is lost. While you build: convert and shift captions between SRT, VTT and TTML, check caption reading speed, split caption lines, pull transcripts into timed captions, audit readability and unexpanded acronyms, clean text pasted from Word or a PDF, diff a script against what the subject-matter expert changed, fix smart quotes, and check colour contrast.

Why it exists

Curt Zilbersher, who has designed corporate training for twenty-eight years, describes the same small unsolved problems recurring across his career — counting narration words, finding the asset that pushed a course past an LMS limit, auditing caption coverage by hand — and is building the fixes and giving them away. The site also runs a free annual survey on how instructional designers actually spend their week.

Connected Concepts

Learning Design, Online Teaching and Learning, Formative Assessment, Educational Technology Developers