If you are building courseware for your organisation or getting it developed by a vendor, there are a number of ancillary factors that you might want to weigh before assigning the responsibility beyond the act of designing and developing the course.

1. File Storage Capability – A typical e-learning course of a duration of an hour usually constitutes 50–60 slides. This can require more than 100+ files (audio, graphic, image, text, Storyboard, content, etc.) if one is planning each slide minutely. An e-learning course is not unlike a software program with its constituent files. The files need to be stored carefully either by the Client or the vendor. Clients (especially in non-tech industries) are not geared to maintain such repositories of files. Hence, the vendor should have the capability to maintain the files at its end.
2. Version control – Only maintaining the file may not be adequate in a swift changing domain (especially in TC’s domain of BFSI), where the course is impacted by changes in regulations, market trends, technology, etc. It is also important to be able to maintain versions, rollbacks to be made and other complexity. The fun starts if the Client requires the course in multiple languages (take a look at some of the programs we have designed for the Financial Inclusion domain); the challenges increase exponentially.
3. Process Orientation – A process-orientation for change management is a subtle software engineering aspect that impacts e-learning courseware management. Does your vendor have a defined Change Control mechanism, where there is proper impact analysis, effort and time estimation and cost submission? This makes the difference between a smooth upgrade and a chaotic release process. And keep in mind that if this is not handled properly, be ready to face some rather irritated user departments who are not amused at having to complete courses twice due to a rollback.
4. Continuity of Resources – You ask to have a change done in the course. But the voice-over who recorded the original course is nowhere to be found. If you relied on an internal ‘sweet-voiced’ employee, he/she has moved on. If your vendor has recorded it with a Voice artist, that artist might not be available any more. AI-generated voice overs are now available, but has your vendor mastered the ‘programming’ to be done to the voices to ensure they don’t sound bland soulless read-outs? The vendor should have good, long-standing relationships with the required resources so that costs for changes are predictable.
5. The Right Authoring Tool – You need a compliance course developed and you are recommended a bespoke programmed e-learning course development or an authoring tool which gives you multiple features, but requiring specialised knowledge of how to ‘program’ it in. Is the cost-benefit worth it? Use high-end auth tools for high-end (i.e. Level 3 and Level 4) courses. If your vendor disappears from the radar, would your team be able to just purchase the Auth tool license and make the critical changes you need?

There are many other factors which go into deciding on technology and methodology choices for custom courseware development. When your vendor suggests some approaches, take a hard look at whether the costs that you bear will deliver the Return on Investments (RoI) for the medium and long term; not just for year 1, but for year 2 to year 10.

Large organisations have dedicated L&D technical teams to manage the content. But even these are not geared to follow the processes that software houses do. And even large organisations need their courses to breathe, grow, change, evolve over a period of time.