I and likely you have seen Hall of Fame for a variety of entities, rock and roll, athletes and so on.
What we have never seen though is a Hall of Shame for learning technology, including learning systems.
Well, I’ve changed that.
Just as the infamous Turkey Awards, have become a favorite among readers, and vendors who slide into it (and then privately gripe), I hope to name entrants every year, as an award of impressive displays of shame, on behalf of an entire industry.
I was going to go Hall of Fame, and then decided it would be of more interest for a Hall of Shame, leaving the Hall of Fame as a Holiday Gift in October, revving up a yearly tradition replacing Halloween, which honestly, isn’t a HOF more of a reward?
A twist if you think about it, because normally a trick or treat is often a cheap orange wrapped peanut butter thing that cracks your teeth or worse a penny, neither of which I consider a treat. Here though for that magical time of the year, HOF is better fitting as a treat.
As with any Hall of Entrants, I went with five, in no particular order.
I would have included some made up speeches, rather I went totally with some insight.
Tuba Blasting…..(think drum roll with a twist)
Learn.com
A wonderful solution, okay, solid back in the early days, that started out as an aggregater of content and then I assume due to revenue issues (they never said) switched over to an LMS, which imploded, due to lack of revenue – and thus nearly zero R&D.
Learn got acquired by Taleo who promised to invest funding into Learn as an LMS, only to learn (pun not intended) that the funds were not happening (to Learn’s assumption) but Taleo got acquired by Oracle, who used Learn as an initial component of some solution they had.
Anyway, this is why you should just stick as an aggregator, which was actually quite good, just before it’s time.
Sniff.
GO1 LMS
Talk about “hello I bet you never knew this,”.
I saw GO1 in Australia. when they debuted, early on, and yes, they were an LMS.
I can’t speak for Andrew who founded GO1, and is a really nice guy, but he saw the future in content aggregation and selected the key providers, and switched over to GO1 as a content aggregator, which for a long time, lead the pack as an aggregator.
Anyway, this is Shame entry is for GO1 LMS.
Adobe Captivate’s new approach to an authoring tool
Funny story back in 2017, Captivate folks spoke to me after my presentation on Top 10 authoring tools at ASTD (ATD), and not being #1 or something like that.
Captivate has a huge following, especially in 2014 and thereafter, because it competed quite well against Articulate, and really was designed for instructional designers and e-learning developers.
They can argue it still does, but I tried it out, and didn’t feel the same way.
All you need it to take a look and think, “No way would anyone think that.”
Or better yet, download it, take it for a spin, and then ask yourself as someone who has instructional design experience and e-learning development and go, “Yeah, I would buy and use this.”
My internal gut says because you can purchase their LMS, which does not come with Captivate the authoring tool (makes no sense), by adding it on, alignment as an easy to use approach, fits in nicely to the general audience.
For me?
No, no way.
Skillsoft Percepio – Initial launch
Talk about coming out to soon.
Yowsa, what were they thinking?
It was missing so many usual feature sets as a learning platform, I thought to myself, they rushed this to go to market.
A salesperson back then, when I mentioned this, disagreed.
As an expert, uh me, and knowing this space, I still believe they pushed it out far too quickly.
I believe the show was ASTD (before it changed to ATD), but don’t quote me on that part.
Big time mistake to rumble this before it was ready for prime time.
Macromedia going templates for course creation
Macromedia was by far an early front runner for creating web sites.
I and so many others loved it.
While they were still offering it, they started to create templates so folks could build courses.
This is far away before Adobe Presenter and so forth.
The moment I saw that, I said to myself, there goes the industry of products like Authorware, because Macromedia was creating in essence a rapid content authoring tool without all the do, das.
This was templates after all.
Macromedia was acquired by Adobe later on.
Not as a rapid content authoring tool, mind you.
One could easily argue that Presenter and Studio respectively, were the ones to rolled out first the true essence of a RCAT, and I wouldn’t disagree from the standpoint of taking basically being a convertor of PowerPoint, but you could go SCORM wrapper here, which you couldn’t with Macromedia.
Macro was amazing for Flash for those curious, nevertheless once the whole template thing rolled out for course creation, I knew right away, the industry of RCAT was coming.
Thanks Macromedia – you should have stayed true to what you did best.
And not this.
Clip Art (Mid- 90s to say 2010)
Found on the web
I get it.
You need some clip art to add to your paper manual, something, okay anything out there.
It’s so dated and crummy, but hey web sites in the early 90’s used them, so it must be ideal for us.
You could find clip art, as clip art – and not via a search engine, yep, some companies out there had clip art you can purchase, but anyone seeing this stuff, would think, why is my house egged every year?
I know folks still use clip art, but seriously spend a few bucks for your customers, and give them some visual art they can use without it appearing as a cheapo stuff you found using Web Archive or a site that still sells it.
To be frank (no offense to any franks out there), I used clip art with Geocities (RIP, the archive I found notes you may find objectionable material, and no, I can’t recall my neighborhood) when I created a site in 1995.
Bottom Line
Let’s give it up for the debut Hall of Shame 2026 entrants
- GO1 LMS
- Skillsoft Perceipo rushed to the market
- Learn.com
- Clip Art
- Adobe Captivate version 2026 (I never looked to see if it launched in 2025 with the new easy to use, RCAT)
Congrats everyone!
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