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How Curating Web and Internal Knowledge Solves the E-Learning Budget Crisis

For years, Learning and Development (L&D) professionals have struggled to deliver effective, engaging training while facing tight budget and timeline constraints. The cost of content creation is the single biggest pain point in the e-learning space, often leading to training budgets being maintained or cut when there is no perceived Return on Investment (ROI).

The great news is that new tools are available to help L&D teams shift their strategy from expensive custom development to intelligent, low-cost curation. Innovative tools like SCORMY empower training managers to source high-quality content from the web and internal systems, track learner progress, and control costs.

Here is how modern content curation directly addresses the most critical pain points in content development and cost management today.

The Content Creation Cost Crisis

Training departments consistently face significant financial barriers in three key areas:

1. The High Cost of Custom Content Development

The effort required to build courses from scratch is astronomical. Instructional design (ID) alone can require between 20 to 50 hours of work for each hour of training content. Standard rates for instructional designers range from $30 to $75 per hour. This means that custom development is inherently resource-intensive.

If specialized content is required—such as animated explainers or custom multimedia—the production costs increase dramatically. Due to these high development costs, training is often viewed by leadership as a non-essential cost rather than a quantifiable investment.

2. The Expensive Barrier of Authoring Tools

Creating e-learning content typically requires expensive Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) authoring tools, which are sold with monthly or yearly recurring fees. The price of authoring tools can exceed $1,000.00 per author per year. Even when organizations own an LMS, built-in authoring capabilities often require additional licenses and recurring fees.

This high subscription cost is a major pain point, especially for individuals or small companies where the price is "beyond me" when converting to local currency.

3. Content Chaos and Untracked Learning

Many e-learning courses focus on the "delivery of information" that is "already available elsewhere" (like the organization’s intranet). When employees search for just-in-time training or performance support resources on their own—such as how-to videos or documents—this data and knowledge consumption remains invisible to the trainer. The learning manager loses control over quality, and they cannot keep records of who completes it.

SCORMY's Solution: Low-Cost Curation

SCORMY directly tackles these financial and management problems by using its unique, cost-effective approach to content curation based on the highly compatible SCORM standard.  All LMS solutions should support this standard.

1. The Inexpensive, One-Time Purchase Model

SCORMY is a utility that offers a drastic departure from the costly SaaS model.

• No Recurring Fees: The app operates on a one-time purchase basis, requiring no subscription, no accounts, and no passwords. This makes it an inexpensive and super easy to use alternative for small businesses or individual creators.
• Unlimited Course Creation: Users can create an unlimited number of courses. This eliminates the need for purchasing expensive course bundles or paying a fee each time a learner takes a course.
• Data Security: Unlike SaaS solutions, SCORMY is an app on your computer or mobile device.  No internet required.  Much like a calculator app, there is no user account, no login, no personal data, and the courses created are stored on your computer or mobile device.

2. Curate the Web’s Wealth of Information

The internet holds a vast "wealth of information", including excellent YouTube videos that are effective for just-in-time training. SCORMY allows users to quickly turn this information—including blog posts, online articles, videos, and PDF files—into training courses by simply using a URL.

• Saves Learner Time: The app allows trainers to assemble the best online content and videos for any given topic, preventing learners from wasting time looking at clickbait and invalid videos and ensures they find quality resources within the controlled environment of the LMS.
• Trackable Video Engagement: When curating YouTube videos, SCORMY courses are designed to track engagement by dividing the video into blocks. If a learner skips forward, only the blocks watched are considered in the calculation for percent complete, ensuring the learner engages with the content.

3. Capture and Crowdsource Internal Knowledge

One of the most valuable capabilities of SCORMY is turning internal, proprietary knowledge into trackable training, a method that is extremely cost-effective.  SCORMY is extremely easy to use and anyone on your team can use it without training.  With SCORMY, your team can:

• Converting Internal Documents: The app allows teams to leverage existing organizational information stored in Word Documents, Google Documents, PowerPoint Slides, and recorded meetings. Internal documents and slides can be quickly converted into trackable training for the LMS.
• Capturing Experiential Knowledge: You can record an expert, such as "Bob, who is about to retire," explaining how to fix a specialized machine. Similarly, you could interview the top sales representative to record her keys to success. SCORMY quickly turns these videos into online content for the LMS.
• Empowering Employees: Because the app is very inexpensive, organizations can easily crowd source learning by allowing organization members (Subject Matter Experts) to turn their documents and knowledge into training quickly and easily.

Regaining Control and Proving ROI with SCORM

SCORMY ensures that all learning activities are channeled through learning managers to control the learning.

The LMS is crucial for reporting, as L&D professionals are expected to show the effectiveness of their training and report on the return on investment. SCORMY allows learners to discover valuable information using the LMS and get credit for reading it as part of their learning profile.

By ensuring that external and informal resources are available on the LMS, the organization gains the essential metrics needed to:

• Track Completion: Keep records of who completes the training.
• Support the Business Case: Justify the expense by providing data points for calculating ROI.
• Ensure Compliance: Meet the training needs necessary to tick the compliance box.

In the battle against constrained budgets and the demand for quality content, curation is the new creation. By utilizing cost-effective, SCORM-based tools like SCORMY, L&D managers can maximize the impact of every dollar spent, turning training from an unpredictable cost into a measurable, strategic investment.

Learn more at https://www.tebaulttechnologygroup.com/scormy-app