Chronically Underfunded E-Learning

Until recently I was working with a decent budget and the broad guidelines of getting us started on e-learning. Senior Management recognizes e-learning as an opportunity for our training dept to take a giant leap forward and more importantly, achieve a better ROI on our training efforts. That is of course until we hit a slump in sales. As sales go down, so does the training dept’s budget which is bad news for my e-learning project. I saw this coming but reality set in last week when I was told that not only has the e-learning budget been reduced, it has been eliminated until next year at this time.

I am determined to find a way to get my feet wet in e-learning so what are my options? I have already played around with a free authoring tool called Course Lab. So far I have been very impressed with Course Lab especially since it is a free product. However, Course Lab is useless if I cannot make the courses available to anybody. I was hoping to be able to upload the zipped SCORM package to a document library in Sharepoint 03 but that didn’t work out so well.

I have the ability to create classes, now how do I make them available to the rest of the company and how do I track it’s use? And here’s the twist, how do I do it for free? In my quest for the answer to this question I came across Moodle. At first Moodle seemed too good to be true but I soon realized that it was more complicated than I thought and that we would most likely need to hire help if we were to go down this avenue. Moodle may be cheap but most companies are going to have to shell out some cash to either have it hosted or get help with the implementation. So, even though it’s cheap, it’s not free. The Quest Continues!

The Quest is continuing with the book E-Learning Solutions on a Shoestring by Jane Bozarth. This book is reccomended to “chronically underfunded trainers” such as myself. I’m hoping that this book leads me to the promise land of effective e-learning at the low, low, price of FREE!