we have been down this road many times and ultimately trained the design team on how to create items so they can load and TEST their content before it goes to the LMS Admin team for final testing and publishing. If you have a sandbox that can also be very helpful for your design team.

You can train folks to create the course, but not give them access to the catalogs, then have someone do a quick final check of the content/course build before placing it in the catalog that is visible to learners.  

This helps take the load of creating the courses and testing them out of the hands of the administrator.  This way the admin just needs to do a final check and then add to the appropriate catalog.

We have done something similar to this, but also incorporated sign off forms that the course creator’s manager must sign as approval of the content as well. 

@lhewett One important thing to condider is the volume of courses that an individual SME will create in a given year/quarter/month.

If it is infrequent they will forget all the training and will have to re-learn each time. In such case, while it is a heaver load for the Admins it is often easer to do it right (for them) than it is to find other people’s mistakes in a review.

Conversely if they are producing courses at a high rate, the SMEs should be able to function as power users with training and guidance. The repetion will cement the process and they too will become pros. 

We are currently using a form from Smartsheet that our Learning Experience Designers (LXD’s) are using to help me as the LMS Admin upload the materials.  It’s working perfectly.  I have all the details I need to upload or update assets.