Wow! This is a super important question. In cases where the courses you have are long, e.g. 20 minutes plus, there’s always the possibility of stopping for whatever reason part way through. As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, it’s important to be able to get back to where you left off and if those are the sort of courses you have or are planning to use then ‘tracking’ is really important for you.
In relation to tracking you’ll come up against a term called SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) which is a collection of standards and specifications for web-based electronic educational technology known as E-Learning. Rather than going into immense detail here, put simply, SCORM based courses tracks where a learner is in their course.
If, however, you’re looking for content that is short bitesize chunks of learning of less than 5 minutes, it’s likely that in the vast majority of cases that you’ll finish the course and, if you need to go back to a specific point in it for any reason, doing that will be very easy indeed. Even in SCORM based courses it’s most unlikely that you’re just going to pick up from where you left off as most would probably just track back a little further to re-familiarise themselves with where they were before leaving the course in the first place.
Furthermore, if your course is more of a ‘dip in’ type of content style, where you go to find out about a specific thing out or to refresh your knowledge, then tracking or SCORM may not be so important.
At the end of the day it comes down to both the type of learning that is being delivered, the objective of the learning module and what you want and need as an organisation in terms of proof of learning.