The History of Rapid Intake

by Garin Hess, CEO

Rapid Intake is a unique kind of e-learning software company. We believe in open e-learning development and in supporting our customers with the best support and training available. Let me explain “open.” We believe that e-learning development should be open to everyone, not to just those who can afford the high prices many companies charge. We don’t believe you should have to be tied to a vendor with long contracts. We don’t believe that expensive licensing should determine who can use the software inside your organization. And we don’t believe the software you use to build e-learning content should artificially constrain what you can do with it—so our software itself is open and allows you to customize and extend it as needed.

This radical approach arises from our history.

Steve Hancock and I started Rapid Intake in 2000, developing custom e-learning courses for large companies with a wide range of training needs, including HP, Lockheed-Martin, Intel, Freightliner, and others. We know what it takes to design and develop excellent e-learning courses from scratch. Even during that part of our history, we took a radical approach. Unlike other vendors that used proprietary methods to keep their customers in the dark, we tried to help ours learn how to maintain and even create courses for themselves. Though it may seem counter-intuitive, we saw that the more we could teach them to provide for themselves, the happier they were with our services.

As our business evolved, Steve and I and our growing staff worked hard to help other organizations learn how to create e-learning themselves. By 2004 we had published a series of books teaching others how to create e-learning from scratch and we had launched the popular eLearning DevCon conference, an industry conference focusing on e-learning development best practices.

We worked with many organizations—training them how to design and development e-learning using Adobe Flash. While Flash is a very powerful tool, what we learned through this process is that most people want to focus on building good training content, not on spending four to six months learning powerful but difficult tools.

Responding to requests by our customers and book readers, we released the first software based on the Rapid Intake e-learning development platform in 2005: ProForm Rapid eLearning Studio (then called Flashform). ProForm has been adopted by hundreds of organizations around the world. It was ranked as one of the most powerful and flexible rapid e-learning tools available by the 2007 eLearning Guild Market Research Survey. Rapid Intake ProForm was voted best course authoring tool by Elearning! Magazine readers in 2008.

Building on the success of ProForm, we began to brainstorm an even better dream. Imagine a web-based e-learning development solution that could be accessed by any team member, subject-matter expert, or project stakeholder from anywhere in the world. Imagine a solution that allowed people to collaborate on the same project at the same time. And imagine a solution that didn’t just focus on rapid development, but also included tools to facilitate collaborative review of the course before it was deployed (a big pain point for most organizations). Work on this new product began in 2006 and was concluded in early 2008. And so, in February 2008, we launched our web-based e-learning development solution, Unison™ Web-based Rapid eLearning Studio.

Since then Unison has won three different awards, including the coveted Gold Award for Innovative Learning Technology from the Brandon Hall Research.

I’d like to personally invite you to sign up for a free or paid subscription account today. If you’re anything like our other customers, you’re going to find it unbelievably easy to use, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can start turning out top-notch courseware.

Please join me for a discussion of e-learning development best practices on my blog, e-Learning Juice (From Concentrate). I'm somewhat over an intermittent blogger because with a family (3 kids) and a growing business, I find it hard to write about all that I'd like to. Still, drop by my blog and drop me a comment--I’d love to hear from you.

Garin Hess, CEO
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