Teams were invited to participate in the Shootout based on their ability to meet all the requirements of a scenario of a a made-up company with the following characteristics...

Scenarios:

• The company has 250 employees, spread out in three different countries (hence the need for e-learning delivery). They would like to be able to run their LMS and e-learning courses from one central server (at the home office in the U.S.), but they are open to suggestions on the best approach.
• They want to create about 80 percent of their own content. They aren’t necessarily looking for content authoring in the LMS, but they would at least like you to make a recommendation on what authoring products to use. They have some anxiety from reading articles about the difficulties of integrating e-learning content with an LMS. They’ve heard that “standards-compliant” doesn’t always mean plug-and-play. They are looking to you for guidance in helping them make good choices.
• They want their internal SMEs to create much of the content.
• They would like to entertain the idea of buying some third-party courses (sales and customer service training) to round out their curriculum. They would like to know how open your system is to launching third-party courses, especially ones that are standards-compliant (AICC/SCORM). They figure about 20 percent of their content will be off-the-shelf. If your system isn’t standards-compliant, how would you recommend they proceed?
• They want to make sure they have full access to performance data. They’d like to do ad hoc reporting, if possible. How can they do this?
• They also want their employees to be able to communicate with others who are enrolled in the same course. They are not looking for live, synchronous (virtual classroom) capability right now, but they would like to use threaded discussions (topic-based) and/or learner-to-learner, instructor-to-learner e-mail, or something like that. If you don’t have this capability, how would you recommend integrating it?
• They also want some basic classroom management. They offer about 25 courses per year and want to post these courses through their learning site when they become available. They also want the system to do some basic enrollment and wait listing if possible. Other areas that would get them excited are automatic notification via e-mail for those who enroll, and they would also like to have managers grant approval before enrollment occurs.
• They haven’t figured out yet whether they want to have you host the LMS for them or install it on their local intranet. They are looking to you for guidance in helping them figure out which would be more cost-effective and which will work best for their situation. Make your case either way….or both ways for them to choose.
• Bottom line: How much will all of this cost? Can you give them some ballpark figures based on what they are trying to do today?
• Finally, they think they might open up their training to end users in the next two years. Their estimate is that about 2,000 end users (in addition to internal employees) might benefit from the training. How does the system (and more importantly the pricing model) scale to meet their needs?

The format of the Shootout was to literally have each team, in a round-robin format, address the needs of our made-up company. Each team was given a list of tasks to complete in a three-minute debrief. The Shootout area was set up with four large screens, allowing the audience to view the competitors side-by-side.

This category required the LMS vendors to go to the Web site www.entnet.org/index2.cfm and match their look and feel in creating an empty learning portal. We had all the vendors bring up the interface they created at the same time, then we asked the audience to vote on who had done the best job.

This category required each team to (1) attach an AICC-compliant or SCORM-conformant course to their course catalog, (2) add a new user, (3) assign the new user to the course, (4) launch the course as the learner, (5) show how performance data flowed from the course into the LMS, (6) show how a learner would see his/her own score, and (7) show how an instructor or administrator would also see this score.

This category required each team to (1) show how a learner sees his/her own score, (2) show how an admin user would see the score, and (3) discuss how reports might be customized.

This category required each team to (1) add a classroom event to the curriculum, (2) register the learner for the class, (3) show how enrollment and notification work, and (4) show how an instructor could add performance data for the classroom event.

This category required each team to (1) show how threaded discussion might be added, (2) show internal, learner-to-learner and learner-to-instructor e-mail, (3) show how a virtual classroom session might be added, and (4) demonstrate any other unique collaborative capabilities.

This category required each team to (1) tell how long it would take to implement their solution, given the scenario above, (2) tell how much their solution would cost for both a hosted and a locally installed solution, and (3) discuss what upgrade paths look like if our made-up company moved from 250 learners to 2,000 learners. Note: In general, the audience gave the highest scores to those with the lowest cost.

Audience preference based on overall impression.