One Example
A team of five people are trying to create a course. There are also three stakeholders that need to review the course before it is deployed. The development team consists of an instructional designer, two subject matter experts, an audio voice-over talent, and a content developer creating interactions.
Desktop Authoring
How does this team work together? Odds are that all five people will have to license the desktop software. Estimating a cost of $1,000 per seat, the start-up cost is $5,000.
Who is going to ensure all of the source materials for the course are backed up?
Do you have to buy a central server?
What if we have a 3rd party help us?
Can they get on our network?
What about your desktop standards?
Do you have to have your IT department install your authoring software?
How much does that cost?
Assuming you get everything installed, how does the team "collaborating"? Through email? Sending project files over and over again is far from efficient. As you muddle through that process, what do you have when you are done? More than likely you'll end up with a distributed potpourri of courseware files buried in everyone's "c:\MyCourses" directory. You are also left with a number of questions.
What happened when developer #1 applied the latest patch to his version of the authoring software…but developer #2 did not?
Who has the latest version of the course?
Where are the Photoshop source images?
Who has the latest audio files?
Once the course is ready for review, how do you get the steakeholders' feedback? Do you have to publish to a web server? Send them the project files and have them license the authoring software? Contact your IT department and have them install the course somewhere? Once they have access to the course, what then? More email and screen captures? Maybe you have to hold desktop sharing conferences. How much does that cost?
Improving the Process
As the above example illustrates, the "per author" licensing fee is just the beginning of your costs. The sheer time, inefficiency, and lack of support for the development process far exceeds the per seat license.
The CourseAvenue Model
The team is assembled by the Team Manager and each person gets their own contributor login ID. If you need to add someone, simply clicking "Add a Friend" adds a person to CourseAvenue. They quickly received an email with their login information.
As the team works on the course, they can collaborate via an integrated threaded discussion group, or forum, and all of the learning assets are contributed to a central library. The stakeholders are added to the team as Course Reviewers where they can preview the course and share their thoughts in the Community forum.
When the course is deemed complete is then published via FTP from within CourseAvenue Studio to the LMS content server for delivery to the users. One can also make an online or offline archive of the course for version management and control.
The CourseAvenue Solution
In the above example, the team could have purchased a quarterly subscription to CourseAvenue Studio for as little as $550.00.