As Instructional Designers move away from purely being creators of content, to developers of tools and applications that assist learning and support performance, understanding the processes used by the software development industry becomes rather important. The quality of an application doesn’t depend on the content it contains, but rather its functional design, technology architecture, implementation and optimization. In other words, it is about the end-user experience. The design of ‘good’ software applications is a very different ballgame from developing courseware.

Perhaps the first major aspect of software development process to filter into eLearning development is the use of iterative development. The movement away from a linear development process can only be good for eLearning. Endless rounds of alphas and betas, and a go-live date were stressful for all project stakeholders. As we become used to software (especially web-services) being in perpetual beta, it is now possible to release often, sometimes just enough to provide the learning, before adding significant graphic design and interaction effort. Having a fixed iteration schedule also helps get feedback faster, and that can be leveraged in the next iteration. This method leads to better quality courseware that focuses on the essentials first, and gradually improves the graphics and interaction. Rather than attempting to get it all right at the first go, which rarely works because it is difficult to do when attempting to satisfy multiple stakeholders with diverging perspectives on ‘good’ eLearning. Iterative development clearly offers many advantages the conventional linear development process doesn’t, however we are yet to see significant adoption of this model in our industry.

The second element percolating into eLearning is the use of prototypes. I feel this practice from software design and development has penetrated eLearning far more than the use of iterative development and is fairly well established. A prototype accomplishes a lot of things for the developers and designers – it simulates the final design, features, aesthetics and functionality, this in turn allows for stakeholders to get a ‘feel’ for the product being developed, as also provide feedback that is realistic and not based purely on documented designs or storyboards. The ability to allow learners (users) to interact with the prototype results in better and more constructive feedback for designers. Reduced time and costs for development are one obvious advantage of prototyping, but I see the increased involvement of users in the design process as a significant advantage as well. This involvement has a direct impact on the tangible and intangible quality of the product to be developed. Having said that, there are two common traps I’ve seen eLearning projects using prototyping falling into. First, spending way too much time on developing the prototype. Users and developers often get stuck in debating the details of the prototype, resulting in delays on actual development. Second, feature creep is a big deal with prototypes. While they start out to model a few basic features, users start to expect more and more as they see and use the prototype. Without clear requirement and design management, this will eventually bring the development to a halt. Its far easier and better to draw a line and coach users on what they can expect and demand from the development team.

There is much learning to garner from software development models and processes. What techniques from other industries do you use in eLearning development?

Make haste slowly
– Benjamin Franklin

We’re getting used to instant search, instant news, instant messages, instant updates, instant food, instant banking, and instant everything. In this world of instant gratification sometimes we need to take a moment and think is everything really necessary ‘now’?  Aren’t there things that need more time to be created properly, created beautifully?  While elearning itself helps the instant gratification needs of learners by being available whenever and wherever, elearning development needs little more time to be created well and can’t really be instant.

Every now and then we have prospects /clients wanting us to take up projects with unreasonably difficult deadlines maybe because they have internal or external commitments to meet, or just that their CEO has asked it to be ready on a particular date. We’re asked to comply or else they’d look for another vendor.  I’ll admit, we do comply with such requirements at times to keep clients within our fold. More often than not, we try and convince our clients that rushing through design and development isn’t a good option for either of us. Eventually a rushed project leads to additional costs, lower quality, missed deadlines, and lots of heartburn. Sometimes the unreasonable deadlines could be a result of delays from clients; yet they don’t want the delays to affect the final; this makes every milestone along the way more difficult to meet. Our regular clients understand this very well (having been there done that) and don’t unreasonably rush a bespoke development project.

‘Haste makes waste’ is a proverb we are taught and surely we know it to be true from our own experience.  Still, that’s one thing some clients are not willing to accept when it comes to custom elearning development.  Here ‘haste’ is not to be confused with ‘Rapid eLearning’ which has its own place in custom elearning development and it works very well in certain situation, for certain programs. We ourselves do a fair bit of Rapid Authoring projects but with reasonable timeframes for delivery.

Earlier I shared 5 keys to make eLearning outsourcing work where one of point is to Follow Process. Usually while accepting a difficult deadline, the vendor is squeezing or doing away with some steps of the process which hurts the projects objectives later. Also it is very important to note the elearning development is an iterative process. The iterative aspect, if built into the process itself, will help you get better elearning output. If you wish to create effective elearning do not push for unreasonably difficult deadlines. Remember haste indeed makes waste when it comes to custom elearning development.

With its immense popularity the iPad has found its way into both education and corporate sectors alike.  Our discussions with clients over past few months indicate schools believe it’s great to deliver ‘personalized & interactive lessons’ while corporate entities believe it is an important device in the future of workplace learning. The iPad is beginning to be included amongst the delivery options available so the discussions invariably turn to the question – should we consider developing this in HTML5 to make us future proof?  This question has started featuring in many discussions, indicating Apple is starting to win the war against Adobe. Adobe too seems to have realized this and is preparing to launch Captivate with capability to output HTML5 for iPad. It’s probably safe to say HTML5 will become a widely adopted technology for elearning development and I do think it Apple’s iPad that’s really driving it at the moment.

Understand the business – not just superficially
As L&D professional you need to understand what your organization does and what your people do. What are the core skills they need to have to do a good job and what’s the difference between various tasks that they perform? Unless you know this well enough, you’ll not be able to think about their learning/training needs. How do you convince an experienced surgeon to attend training on a new surgical method; especially when you don’t know how the new method is better than the older one?

Share the pain, and then joy
Missed deadlines, products faults, customer complaints, infrastructure issues- there are many types of problems in each and every organization. While they’re unpleasant, they are the issues that you need to identify as learning opportunities. You need to be there with the people when they are stuck with something – to share their pain. And then propose training sessions/plans to resolve those pain points. Being there during the pain lets you visualize how a solution would work to reduce the pain; helping you create better solutions. Also being part of their painful moments gets your solutions easy acceptance.

Think like a business person
Your CEO is a busy person with numerous things on his mind every moment – finance, customers, productivity, stakeholders, marketing et al.  You don’t want to be another of those items but rather act as an enabler for all of those. How to help improve productivity? How to ensure customer satisfaction? Speak the right language and your CEO would welcome you whenever you need his time.

Be action oriented
Don’t just sit in your office and hold so many meetings. Go out in the field and spend time with the teams. Observe them, interact with them and ask what they need to perform better. You’ll be amazed at the insights you gather from the field, from your own people. And that you can’t get from any HR management book or from any HR consultant.

Have courage & conviction
You’ll need to be convinced about your own ideas and plans to be able to sell them to your CEO. Its not necessary that all of them would be accepted but every CEO likes to see a logical case being presented for discussion. Have the courage to say “I was wrong” when you are.

Have a story – be able to see the goal
15 years ago if anyone gave you a laptop and asked ‘do you need this?’, you’d have probably said NO. Today our lives depend on laptops. The state of L&D in most organizations in India is similar(and probably elsewhere too). Your organization needs you but just doesn’t know it yet. So have a story, built a vision and sell that vision to your CEO.

More important that providing value is to be perceived to be providing value
Even if you do a good job but people don’t think you did a good job; then you may wonder what’s the point? L&D professionals need to take responsibility for the perceptions you create about your role. Go out and change it.

If you have been involved with custom eLearning development you have either asked these questions yourself or have been asked these by a client. The concept of ‘levels’ of custom eLearning development is a commonly used standard matrix for comparing vendors; sadly, this is a much abused concept too.. Every vendor (and client) has a unique definition of levels and they seldom match.

Last month The Chapman Alliance published the results of their study about the efforts taken for development of various levels of custom eLearning. A summary is presented below.

In my opinion, these levels are more about multimedia development rather than the learning design/strategy. They are in no way linked to the learning value of the program.  Multimedia development is a secondary aspect of learning strategy, not the strategy itself. But the difference between the two sometimes gets blurred, especially since levels have a direct impact on the development cost.

A Fresh Perspective

I think we can divide the different types of eLearning courses based on two parameters – Type and Level. The Type corresponds to the level of bloom’s taxonomy that the course is targeting. Each Type further having multimedia development at 3 possible levels. So one can have 9 type of possible courses namely CT1-MM1, CT3-MM2 etc.

In terms of cost of development these may stack up something like this:

In terms of costs this would present a similar picture as that shown in The Chapman Alliance survey. However, this presents what I believe is a more correct way to select an appropriate solution.

First select a Type of solution that suits the performance outcomes and learning objectives, and then impose cost constraints on it.  To simplify the implication –choose one of the lines on the graph and settle at the multimedia level your development budgets allow.

1. Business Strategy
2. Geographical Expansion Of Business
3. New Business Opportunities (which may lead to new skill development)
4. Cost and Benefits
5. Organizational Culture/Demographics
6. Infrastructural Readiness
7. Management Support

Some of these change factors translate to simply ‘business needs’ which fuel the need for e-learning in the business. Without the appropriate need or a real business case for e-Learning, it may seem like another fad.

E-learning will have to specifically contribute to increasing revenue, reducing costs, and increasing efficiencies (by means of skill building).

The other factors determine the readiness of an organization to adapt to e-Learning. A readiness evaluation is extremely critical since the decisions taken at this point make a significant impact on the success of any strategy.

Business Needs

1. Business Strategy/Goals
   For any initiative to be successful one needs to align its goals to the business goals. Training for training’s sake needs to be avoided; e-learning must be focussed on providing a value addition in terms of performance and efficiency improvement.
   By linking e-learning goals to the immediate or future business needs, one leverages the value of training and perception of the learning in the organization.  Ultimately, e-learning must impact organizational performance.
2. Geographical Expansion
   This is definitely one of the primary benefits that e-Learning provides. Training can be delivered over varied distances across the country or the world using all possible media one can imagine including video, web-conferencing, social network tools, etc. This list only increases with every passing technology generation.
   elearning is great for organizations who have branches in different geographical regions. It helps them collaborate and work together from their respective locations and also saves tremendous time and effort to travel.
3. New Business Opportunity
   Stepping into a new business opportunity may require that employees pick up skills in the least possible time. E-learning can help build knowledge and skills quickly without involving much cost and effort.
4. Cost Benefits
   Time is money! If you can reduce the training time of an employee on the job (without compromising on the quality of learning) the remaining time can be used for more productive work.  In the long run, e-learning reduces the cost of training.
   Ideally a cost-benefit analysis should be done to measure the direct and indirect costs involved in the design, development, delivery, and maintenance of the program. Different industries and organizations have different business models and way of doing business; keep that in mind when doing any sort of analysis.

E-Learning Readiness

Once it is determined there is a need for e-Learning, we need to assess the readiness of the organization to make a move towards it.

Perhaps one drawback of e-learning is the absence of human intervention in the form of face-to-face interactions, verbal communication and mostly importantly feedback. However, now even these are changing with the new wave of collaboration technologies.

1. Change in the Culture/Demographics
   Corporate culture can help or hinder an e-learning initiative, sometimes pushing and pulling in both ways. E-learning can also be a tool to support cultural change. If individuals are used to attending training programs in far-away idyllic locations, also giving them time off work for a few days, they may fail to understand the concept of learning while sitting at their desks in front of their computers.
   A culture of instructor-led training will need to be dealt. One must consider the learner’s state of mind and the interpersonal aspects of the environment as these will impact the learning outcome. Understanding the culture of an organization helps assist in understanding the learning style, their preferences and the readiness of learners for such technology based interventions.
   For organizations that are structured from the top-down, are task-oriented or have a considerable population of people who aren’t computer savvy; a straightforward curriculum of courses would work well.  For democratic, people-oriented companies, collaborative e-learning systems are the way to go. If your company is a true “learning organization”, you will need a broad program of collaborative e-learning and knowledge management.
2. Infrastructural Readiness
   E-learning is subject to technological barriers. Courses and tools may require considerable bandwidth and current or updated versions of browsers, video/audio codecs, relevant software updates, etc. at all times.
   Though these may work well at a particular location, in others it may be rendered useless because of unavailability of internet or even computers. In the presence of these barriers, e-learning may not be able to provide the learning experience designed for.
3. Management Support
   The primary strength behind all successful initiatives in an organization is a constant support by the top management. Securing commitment from the top management is essential as they have the ability to influence the immediate managers who mobilise the staff to training. Apart from approving budgets, they promote and communicate a consistent organizational learning message.

Change Agents

A change can be enforced, initiated, guided by people who become change agents. The most common people to bring about a change in the learning methodology are the training and development heads, who take the onus of introducing such concepts to the organization. A change agent can be seen as a  high-level champion who will do what is necessary to ensure success.

E-learning is not a panacea for what ails learning and development in organizations. Face-to-face interaction, laboratory training, group discussions, or mentoring can never be replaced by e-learning. For the best learning, change agents will need to optimize solution for individuals by adapting a blend of both.

What Plato said then holds true for training today. From the days when training was deemed a crucial element in the development of an individual to today when it has come to become a bitter pill forced down peoples’ throats by HR.  More often than not, there are glitches in the learning needs analyses, the design of the training content, the choice of delivery mode, the choice of the trainer, and other such. Sometimes it is the way the training is presented to the learners – not as an opportunity but almost like punishment.

Five reasons people have developed distaste towards training courses:

1. They are a distraction from work
   Most people don’t enjoy going to training because they are distracted by the work they left behind at their desks. They spend time thinking about it while they are in training. Most managers don’t consider ‘time spent training’ in employee evaluations as enthusiastically as they might mandate it in the workplace.
2. The wrong selection of candidates
   Many times when a training program is organized by HR where managers are required to nominate subordinates, then rather than selecting candidates who deserve the particular training, such individuals are selected who can be easily spared from work. This training is irrelevant to them. In turn neither the individual nor the organization benefit from the training.
3. Wrong notions
   Attending a course means accepting that you still can learn something. There are people who avoid going to training about certain subjects because this would mean accepting a weakness in the area. Some people don’t like the name ‘training course’, because they think they know everything there is to know about a subject. In such cases, it may be a better practice to change the name to “information sessions” so that it does not insult their intelligence levels.
4. Lack of relevance
   Training, no matter how great, holds no value if it is not relevant to the learner.
5. No implementation of the new skills
   Often, even when a right candidate undergoes the right training and comes back with a strong urge and enthusiasm to implement what been learned, he is given a cold shoulder by his boss and questioned about missed targets rather than priority to learning and implement new ideas.

What can be done?
Breaking this non-sustainable loop requires a deep understanding that training has only one purpose: to develop individuals so they can out-perform on their current tasks and be-prepared for what business leaders have in mind for the future. This in turn, requires an alignment and strategic collaboration between the business leaders and their HR partners.

“Training” itself as a concept and process needs drastic changes. In today’s environment training means – Knowledge and Best Practices sharing. No one is interested in a session where the ‘Trainer’ owns 90% of the session with 10 % given to the participants to participate. It requires more interactive and interesting methodology and process with different delivery modes (eLearning, mLearning, Instructor Led Training etc.) weaved in for the potential benefit of every single participant.  The blended approach gives learners and teachers a potential environments to learn and teach more effectively.

Training should provide value to the participant. Education in whatever form, formal, skill-building, development, or training, comes down to the same factors of success. It’s got to be relevant in one way or another, it’s got to be challenging, it’s got to be useful, it’s got to be inspiring, and each participant has to feel like you’re talking to them. It’s the responsibility of those in charge of organizational learning, those in charge of instructional design, and those in charge of class/workshop delivery to make it so. Anything less, and you get the kind of mediocrity that makes staff actually prefer to stay in their office than to get a half-day, a day, or more, rather than having fun and learning stuff to improve themselves and improve organizational performance, away from it.

The training and development initiative should also be “evidence based” with pre and post measures being taken to evaluate performance and development improvements. This can be brought about by using Learning Management Systems. UpsideLMS is one such Learning Management System that is equipped with a scalable assessment engine and automated feedback mechanism, which helps bring about effective evaluation of your organization-wide, multi-location, learning programs.

The bottom line is that effective learning requires an interesting topic, interactive and diverse in delivery style and delivery mode, developed/delivered according to best practices, with considerations given to the context, content and application needs of the learners (i.e. on-the-job) and most importantly it is about the participants (attendees).

The study categorizes custom elearning into 3 levels as below:

They had asked about the time it takes to develop content at each of these levels.
Here are the results:

These two slides suggest the per hour resource rate is greater than $100.

That sounds fairly high and it seems like many of the organizations participating in this study are not outsourcing their custom elearning development work. I do believe there is room for them to explore a cost saving of 25-50%

Another interesting slide is the most frequently used components in a blended solution. Clearly classroom, virtual classroom, self paced elearning make up the bulk of the blend.

Source Citation:  Chapman, B. (2010). How Long Does it Take to Create Learning? [Research Study]. Published by Chapman Alliance LLC. www.chapmanalliance.com

The training plan below, assumes that you’ll have the following skills to speed your iPhone development:

• Knowledge of C/C++/Java
• Design patterns like MVC-2, Delegate
• Event delegation model in core java

Having knowledge of a server side programming language like J2EE, PHP, or ASP.Net will certainly help as any reasonably sophisticated iPhone app will require communication with third party services for data. Knowledge of web services like Restful (for communication) and JSON for data interchange is an added plus.

This training plan if properly implemented can help you create productive and utility kind of applications. To create immersive kind of application like games you will need to know OpenGL ES programming, which is another matter altogether.

Try out this training plan, I hope it helps you started on iPhone development. Do comment on what you tried and if you liked or disliked it.

His previous data – from his March 2007 post – on this gives us the following ratios for different type of learning:

Most of these look  acceptable to me if we assume that ILT and Powerpoint to e-learning conversion is being done by SMEs and they don’t need support of any development staff. I don’t expect the new data to change dramatically from this, but you never know. Last year I had written about this (read it here) with reference to an ASTD article where some of the numbers were a bit out of synch or so appeared to me.

Let’s see what the latest survey throws up.

- When do I use it?
- What do I like about it?
- What do I not like about it?

For many tools, the answers are as expected. Again, the fact surfaces that not all tools are perfect but each tends to be targeted for specific use cases. The mind map can help learning professionals choose the right authoring tool for  their requirements and expectations.

I’ve been  wandering around the web to find the right authoring tool for  specific use cases. While searching I realized that many learning professionals often confuse between their requirements and the specific features offered by the chosen tool. For example, a feature that lets users  “import” existing PowerPoint presentations into the authoring tool is different from authoring and publishing eLearning content from within  PowerPoint (using a plug-in toolbar). While some try doing freeform authoring through a template-based authoring tool. However, both methods have different workflows and properties.

Here are some features that eLearning professionals generally expect from authoring tools –

• They should have an intuitive interface – preferably WYSIWYG – allowing easy authoring and simple functionality.
• Should be easy to control and manage graphic styles across course to enforce style guidelines and branding.
• Localization processes using the tool should be easy and fast.
• Should be able to import/export content (like PPT, DOC, or simple HTML), and allow for edits after import.
• Should be able to import external Flash SWF as well as audio and video in variety of popular formats.
• Standard and customizable compliance. (SCORM 1.2, 2004, AICC)
• Should be able to publish course in various formats. (web, LMS, CD-ROM)
• Functionality of some kind for offline tracking if courses are not being delivered from any LMS.
• Ability to capture reviewer notes in context to the pages – one useful feature of collaborative authoring.

One more feature which is not required in most cases but would be much of help to advanced authors – is some way to extend/customize tool functionality through programming. For example, for a course published through Articulate, if I’d wanted SCORM tracking with a different behavior, I might be able to achieve that using the SDK provided by Articulate.

Please note, I haven’t considered full-fledged development tools like Adobe Flash, for which some amount of technical proficiency is required.

What other features/functions you would expect from the eLearning authoring tools you would be or are using?

Before beginning to develop mLearning on their own, they should keep in mind some technical considerations. Earlier we’ve mentioned some tools that can assist you in mLearning applications. However, each one needs a fair bit of knowledge and skills before they can actually implement solutions using these tools.

However, to alleviate such difficulties, there are some rapid authoring tools available that can create mLearning without needing to acquire the technical skills. Here are some authoring tools that claim to let authors develop content targeted at mobile devices.

HotLava LMA (Learning Mobile Author)

It lets you create single authored source content deployable across multiple formats and supported devices. It has recently partnered with OnPoint Digital, Inc.

• Supports major types of images, audios, videos, bulleted/numbered lists and text integrated in the form of templatized format, tests, quizzes, polls/surveys.
• Simple form-based content authoring with support for interlinking the content.
• Content can be directly deployed on device OR can be delivered via web.
• Web delivered content can be tracked and managed through their proprietary mobile delivery and tracking system (MDTS).
• Supported mobile platforms are all the Java supported phones, Windows Mobile, PocketPC, Palm and virtually all those that have XHTML web browser – including iPhone and iPod Touch.

Chalk Pushcast

Chalk Pushcast lets you author mLearning through a plug-in for MS PowerPoint, targeted specifically for BlackBerry smartphones.

• Uses familiar freeform authoring of PowerPoint.
• Content is published to BlackBerry Enterprise Server and external stakeholders.
• Published content can be accessed through Pushcast Player installed on user’s BlackBerry smartphone.
• The Pushcast Player takes care of tracking and reporting to server.

Lectora

Although  Lectora doesn’t have implicit “publish to mobile” option, one can easily configure and publish their titles (authored courses) to be viewable on mobile web browsers.

• Lectora and Lectora Online provide templates specifically designed for iPhone and iPad.
• The iPhone templates can also be used for publishing content for smartphones having screen width of 320 pixels. However, one should be careful while selecting compatible multimedia content (audio, video, images) for the targeted mobile platforms.
• Recently they have also released free template sets for the iPad which one can use for iPad content authoring.

Other tools, like Articulate and Content Point also claims to publish for mobile. But their output format is in older versions of FlashLite – which is now available only on devices like the Nokia N95 and Windows Mobile. I don’t consider these significant authoring tools for mLearning development yet. Maybe eventually Flash based tools will gain significance for mLearning provided Flash gets supported by major smartphones and mobile platforms (save the iPhones and iPads).

If you know of any other tools that output mobile compliant content, leave a comment. We’d really like to evaluate and consider those. Thanks!