So it was an adventure choosing an authoring tool.  My story begins with being very new to the Training Department, in the middle of a perfect storm, and a curiosity about SCORM.

My title had been "Mobile Outreach Specialist."  There were two main facets of my job.  One was driving a box truck that was converted into a mobile lending library around to all of the Preschools in our local counties which had a School Readiness contract with the Early Learning Coalition.  It was full of books and learning-toys that preschool teachers could borrow for use in their classrooms to maximize learning through play.  The other was to work at our community events, and attend other Early Learning community events in order to meet people, talk to them about what our organization does, increase the likelihood of sponsorship, and in general form good community relations.

When COVID hit, large community gatherings, and bringing items directly from one preschool to another became very unpopular things. 

So I transferred into the Training Department where I became a trainer of Early Childhood Education Professionals, and now we're branching out to provide family/caregiver training too.

At the time I transferred, our coalition had just purchased an LMS, and hadn't learned much about online courses at all yet.  Both of the other trainers had ages of experience doing in-person training, and the online thing was a whole alien world to them.  It was to me too, but I am an avid autodidact.  My first assignment as a training specialist was, "the LMS has an example of a SCORM course on there, and it looks much cooler than what we've been able to create so far.  Find out how to make a SCORM course."

That began my adventure!  I quickly learned that SCORM wasn't a tool in the LMS for creating courses.  So then began the research into tools that would be great for beginners to break into the world of authoring courses in SCORM compliant tools that worked with our LMS.   iSpring hit all of the checkboxes I was looking for:

We needed something reasonably priced, and it was less expensive than Captivate and Articulate (or whatever the Microsoft one is called).

We needed something that beginners could use, and iSpring advertises a zero learning curve. (in truth there is some learning to be done, but you have a great team of people providing that PD for us! Love you Polina et. al.)  Other tools just looked way out of our league.

We needed something that published SCORM courses compatible with our LMS

I had to be able to learn about the product before recommending to my boss, and without making commitments and entanglements (some companies really drag you in with "demo" arrangements). There were great samples of courses on a sample page, and there was ample information to be found on the web about how iSpring could be used, and how much it costed, whether there were discounts for education/non-profits, etc. 

And iSpring had the super extra benefit of being an add-on for PowerPoint, which was something all three of us were already very familiar with and using!

Thanks for being here!

You guys are great!