After three years, McDonald's Corp. has dropped E-learning content developer SmartForce LLC for rival KnowledgeNet.com Inc. to fulfill the online technical training needs of its IS department's 350-plus employees.

Alice Rowland Weisz, Information Services organization development manager for the fast-food giant, lists high-quality content and overall value as two reasons the company switched in late June to KnowledgeNet, which provides over 257 courses, ranging from Cisco technology to HTML.

"The very engaging, very friendly, and very graphic user interface is unique and very valuable," Rowland Weisz says. Initial reports show improvements in both the length of sessions and repeat users, she says. That's significant because incomplete courses are one of the banes of E-learning. "We had an incredibly low usage number with our previous vendor," says Rowland Weisz.

A SmartForce spokeswoman confirmed the switch this week.

"KnowledgeNet content is more recently designed and built with a Learning Objects mode," says Trace Urdan, a W.R. Hambrecht equity research analyst. SmartForce content is still legacy based, which is not as flexible, he says.

SmartForce, however, has more course offerings, an asset that Urdan says is extremely critical to customers. "The order of preferences in terms of customers is size of library, price, and quality," he says. "KnowledgeNet still can't provide 100% of an IT department's training needs."

Earlier this month, McDonald's said it's launching an online version of its worldwide training curriculum with DigitalThink Inc., another E-learning content provider. If the pilot succeeds, over 1.5 million McDonald's cooks, counter staff, and others will access DigitalThink E-learning in five languages to learn restaurant management and front-line processes.