Questions to ask consultant’s references:
- Did the e-learning consultant fully understand your business and your needs?
- Did the e-learning solution meet your business and learning objectives?
- Were your customers/employees satisfied with the e-learning solution?
For course development, contracts should state that the intellectual property rights stay with your organization. And your customer data should always be available to you.
Statements of Work (SOW) should include:
- A project description
- Project goals and success measures
- A statement of deliverables including due dates
- A project schedule
- Roles and responsibilities
- Clear pricing and timelines for payment
- Project assumptions
This could include:
- Attendance at training industry conferences or better yet, has been a speaker at one of these conferences. (Training, ASTD, TechLearn, e-learning Guild, etc.)
- Membership in ISPI or ASTD demonstrating that the vendor is tied into a community of training practitioners who learn from each other’s experiences.
- Regularly reading major industry publications, such as Training Magazine, T&D, CLO Magazine or Learning Circuits to stay up-to-date on the latest uses of learning technologies.
Conducting and publishing industry research to benefit the learning industry
Development processes can vary based upon the organization and the project. A professional should be able to vary the process to accommodate your needs. However, the process that they use should include some form of a front end analysis (also called Needs Analysis) as well as an evaluation that proves that they achieved your desired results.
This may sound too academic to you, but hiring someone who assimilates educational research findings in their work may ultimately save you money by avoiding known human factors issues which cause costly re-design work. If you hire a person who doesn’t have this background, then make sure that the cost for revisions is fixed and your timeline is flexible.
Just some food for thought … An accountant is CPA and has a degree in accounting or finance. A lawyer has a JD and has passed the bar. Engineers have engineering degrees and technical certifications. Why would you hire an e-learning professional without any formal education or credentials?


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When looking for an e-learning provider, look for the following 10 qualifications:
The more criteria a vendor meets, the more likely that the e-learning solution will achieve your desired results. BlueStreak Learning meets all 10 criteria, so it’s easy to choose!
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| Although learning can produce results, courses are not results. Results may include improved user performance, reduced costs, increased revenue, reduced turnover, greater customer satisfaction. |
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Following these standards can mean this difference between having several courses that don’t work together and having a growing, flexible e-learning program.
Media such as instructor-led online, self-paced Web-Based Training, business simulations, software simulations.
| These professionals have proven that they have successfully completed at least half a dozen results-driven performance improvement projects. For more information see www.certifiedpt.org. |