The Sophie project released an alpha version for Mac, Windows and Linux on July 31st. It also comes with documentation, so it should be a good chance to create some interactive multimedia projects for use in online courses and in other contexts. Here's what Sophie is designed to do: "Sophie's raison d'être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming. We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats. Sophie promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people." I've been on vacation since the end of July and haven't tried out the Sophie alpha, but I hope to get to it soon.
Tools and tips related to online and distance learning and using technology in instruction