You’re right on the money with the cost factors, Ethan. I think the notion of E-Learning as a cost saver really only comes into play when you compare its costs with those of transporting people from the field to a central location for in-classroom delivery of instruction. It should never have been sold as a cost-saver though. I look at it now as being a sustainable option for delivering “awareness” — one solution to be used on its own or in conjunction with other distance learning methods (virtual classrooms, as one example).

E-Learning can do more… but the cost and experience required to do more than just awareness or demonstration become limiting factors.

One of the big 3(starts with “C”) is a perfect example of a client that standardized on Lectora and within a week, was asking for things that lectora could not do or made implementation difficult based o how it liked to organize a course. So we had to roll a bunch of javascript/post export procedures to make it happen since the cash outlay of the product was too much to dump it.

The funny thing was that they chose Lectora (v2005) to get away from having vendors charge developer hours. In the end the developers were the only ones who could deal with the Lectora files. Not that it was Lectora’s fault either. That’s my real thrust-do the research so you know what your buying and not asking the SME’s to produce results the software can’t create. You need to test the product and know what experiences your looking for.

Not directed at you but anyone hitting this post dealing with this issue.

Windows definitely has more options in the canned software options for sure, mac is seriously lacking in that area.

I totally agree with you. However, there are a lot more people engaged in creating E-Learning than people with the requisite skills to put it on the web. For bad or good, more and more of the burden of capturing knowledge needs to push to Subject Matter Experts… and high-level (shrink-wrapped) tools are needed.

My opinion is that there are a lot of educators and academics that make up the demographic of Mac users, and their options for producing SCORM content are few that are native to the platform.

I never heard of Qarbon before, though. I’ll definitely check that out!

But there are not a bunch of shrink wrap do it for you solutions on the mac. I look at it this way-those tools are great but they do make you a slave to the tool rather than be empowered with your own knowledge. I’ve dealt with several people who go with those canned apps and get into trouble when they can’t do something their customer wants. it’s a trade off, so you just need to keep that in mind.

Qarbon has a mac product: http://www.qarbon.com/presentation-software/viewletbuilder/?os=mac