Contractor selection
When selecting a vendor or contractor to assist with your project, you need to first determine what level of interaction with your team is necessary. You also need to define the contractor’s scope of work and how it relates to the rest of the project. Here are some key considerations.
You need more than a multimedia development company
If the contractor is tasked with developing and delivering courses or course content, make sure the vendor is not just a multimedia or Web company, but one who has experience in instructional design. Otherwise you may get a lot of glitz and glam that looks nice but does a poor job of actually teaching the topic or helping students to learn.
Source code and copyright should belong to the project
Make sure the contractor will turn over all source code for maintenance, and that the copyright to the content and code remains with you (or is at least shared)
No rendering or code generation engines should be required
Be clear that you will not accept a product that is based on a vendor-specific “Black box” or engine. For example, some contractors have an XML rendering engine that they sell with the finished product. Others have an engine that generates JavaScript that is interpreted by that engine. Without that engine, the product will not display properly. This means that you are forever forced to pay license fees on that engine and if you move to another platform that doesn’t use XML, you will have difficulty getting any vendor-created content to run.