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.

What Do You Say To an LMS Vendor Who Claims To Support a Tool?

The short answer: Show Me!

The long answer: As with any change to your training solutions, you should perform an appropriate amount of due diligence before taking a Learning Management System (LMS) vendor at their word when they claim support for a tool or standard.  I find that often when the LMS vendors say they support a specific tool, what they mean is that they support only the most basic functionality of the tool. Because of this when you look at a tool and see functionality that you want to leverage with your LMS, be sure to validate that specific functionality is supported. 

You need to think about the LMS vendor’s motivation.  They want to include as many bells and whistles to help convince a customer to sign a multi-year contract with the least amount of effort.  This means they will support many different tools, but also that the depth that their support may not be as extensive as you would like.  I see two main reasons for this behaviour:

1. Many LMS vendors in the course of business will add custom functionality based upon the needs of one client.  Vendors will often re-use a customization that one client required and fold it into their base systems. This is great if you happen to use the tool in the same way as the previous client, but if you don’t, you may be in for a rough and expensive ride extending the system to meet your own requirements.
2. The other reason I see is that a vendor can be driven by a general industry requirement to support a tool or standard.  They know that if they don’t say they support it, it will be a hurdle to getting new business.  What this often means is that they will implement the minimum functionality to be able to truthfully claim they are compliant with the standard or support the tool, but will not support anything beyond the very basic requirements.  I have seen this often with eLearning standards.  For example ask any SCORM 2004 compliant LMS vendor what standard reports they include for displaying the SCORM interactions data for a course.  The SCORM 2004 standard requires the LMS to support storing this information, but it does not require the ability to report on it.  There are many tools that record this question-response information (Articulate Presenter and Adobe Presenter to name two), but many Learning Management Systems would require a custom report to display this information.  This has a predictable impact on time and budget for clients who need ready access to this data for crucial ROI and business intelligence reasons. 
   

Because of this potential gap between a client’s needs and the level of support the vendor may provide, It is essential to verify that the system can completely fulfill not just some but all of your requirement.