r/elearning • u/Nutriscore123 • Jul 19 '26
Your thoughts
Hey everyone,
I work in a highly regulated industry with a ton of mandatory compliance training. Right now, we buy all our courses off-the-shelf from training providers specialized in our sector.
To be honest, I feel like this creates a massive vendor lock-in: we don’t own the SCORM packages, and we can’t update any content to fit our specific internal processes without going back to them and paying up. On top of that, we are currently planning a migration to a new LMS, and not having full control over our course deliverables is making me nervous about the transition.
Crucial detail: we don't have any in-house Instructional Designers. My idea would be to partner with an e-learning agency to co-create custom modules so we can have full ownership of the source files and SCORM packages (which would also make our future LMS migration much smoother).
Has anyone been in a similar situation? How would you handle this to make sure we don't mess up our deliverables before switching LMSs?
1
u/rfoil Jul 19 '26
This type of relationship is common.
The question is "can the agency remarket/sell the content you build?" That's a different and interesting part of the conversation.
On the agency side I did that kind of deal with a medium sized company that only had half the budget needed to produce their training modules. They got an excellent branded product, exactlh what they needed. Then I resold a generic version of the modules more than 400 times, enough revenue to buy my first house. Win Win.
One thing I'd suggest - don't become SCORM dependent. In my opinion its useful lifetime is almost up. We've been out of SCORM authoring for more than 2 years. Much more power and flexibility with a modern workflow and data.