From an LMS integration perspective, how turnkey are the off-the-shelf eLearning solutions (Articulate Presenter, Adobe Presenter, et cetera)?

With the eLearning industry moving from relying mostly on proprietary systems to utilizing standards-based eLearning (within the framework of the AICC and SCORM), off-the-shelf eLearning creation tools are positioned to make eLearning cheaper and easier to deploy than ever before.  That said, they may still need to be tweaked to work on your LMS.

Over the past few years authoring tool vendors such as Adobe and Articulate have made huge strides in both reliability and conformance with the SCORM and AICC standards.  They have become relatively cheap to purchase and – with a good Instructional Designer and eLearning Developer – can be used to create engaging and effective training.  But because every Learning Management System and authoring tool implements the standards differently, there is often a gap that will need to be bridged to get your courses to work properly on the LMS.

Many times, this will simply involve changing a few undocumented configuration files or downloading a patch from the vendor.  I had a client running the Saba LMS for whom I was developing a course in Articulate Presenter ‘09.  The problem I ran into was that the course would never display a status of  “complete” when deployed on the LMS, no matter what the user did.  In this case, I discovered that Articulate had already solved this issue and made a patch available; but there are plenty of times when I have had to go into the code and tweak a setting here and there to get a course to work on a particular system.

In addition, some systems may extend the standard or have custom configurations.  For example, the SumTotal TotalLMS has the option of using SCORM extensions to alter how the course will look and function in the LMS.  You can configure various controls, turn on or off study aids and course progress information, and set the size of the course launch window.  This information must be added to the course’s imsmanifest.xml file for the LMS to configure these values: the default is for these extra controls to be displayed (which is usually the opposite of what is desired).  This requires the course creator to manually reconfigure the manifest to configure these settings after the eLearning tool has built the course.

What this all means is that the tools are supporting the standards, and the Learning Management Systems are supporting the standards, but unfortunately there often is still a gap between the two.  This gap is smaller than it was before (and easier to overcome), but you will still periodically need to do some tweaking to the courses to get them to work properly on the LMS.

Although you may very well run into issues like these when building LMS-launched courseware using off-the-shelf authoring tools, you can overcome them fairly easily, and these tools are getting more capable and effective every year.  If you are not using them now, you will likely be using them soon.