August 2007

Thesis is a third party eLearning authoring tool which can be used with the Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Visio) to turn these electronic files into SCORM 1.2 objects.  There are other eLearning authoring tools (Articulate and Lectora from Trivantis) that can be used with Powerpoint slide decks but those packages don't create SCOs for Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Visio diagrams.  In addition, Thesis comes with a SCO content packager (Learning Object Manager) that can assemble multiple SCOs into a single SCORM 1.2 course package.  The majority of other authoring tools can't assemble (import) more than one SCO even if they can natively create multi-SCO courses like the IBM Lotus Authoring tool.  Other SCO content packagers include Dreamweaver Extension for SCORM and ReLoad.  I haven't used the Dreamweaver Extension but found Thesis more intuitive than ReLoad.  The attached Word document describes how to use Thesis with the IBM Lotus Workplace Collaborative Learning (WCL) and IBM Lotus Learning Management System (LMS).  It includes considerations and recommended best practices.