How much does one hour of Level 2 elearning cost? and what about Level 3?
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.
Our customers account for a number of factors before taking the plunge into e-Learning. I was trying to put together some of the key change factors leading organizations to adopt e-learning stand-alone and as a part of the training blend. I arrived at these factors driving the change:
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
“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.” – Plato
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.
Bryan Chapman from the Chapman Alliance informed me this morning about the completion of a study they started last month to collect data about the time and cost of custom elearning development. The report is available here. I had participated in the study and find the results align well with our own data.
TED has released this video of Dr. Sugata Mitra in which he talks about his experiments with education for children. He talks about some of the issues with education in developing countries. There are some interesting insights, check it out.
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” – William Arthur Ward.
I stumbled across an interesting paper linked to in a post by Karl Kapp. The paper describes a Professor of Reading’s teachers experience and learning from playing digital games and describes some of the learning principles good games incorporate.
John Hegel lll and John Seely Brown have written an article titled ‘Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work’ on HBR blog. The article summarizes the ideas from their new book – The Power of Pull.
Some months back I wrote a couple of posts about elearning outsourcing focusing on why to outsource elearning and how to select a vendor. This post focuses on how to make outsourcing work for you. I list the elements that I feel require key focus to ensure outsourcing is delivering the goods for you now and in future.
Stories are an integral part of our lives, and have been since time immemorial; as tools, they are fundamental to human communication and learning. They have been woven into our lives in the form of fables, bedtime stories, gripping novels, to entertaining and engaging animation and films.
Yes, I’ve not been blogging as regularly as I might have liked to. I’ve been busy with projects – bread and butter.
We’ve always focused on instructional design being essential to the design of courseware. That’s certainly true, it’s the first step to make a learning solution instructionally sound. The next in line is to make it interesting, engaging, interactive. Too many solutions fail at that crucial stage. I’ve seen too many hours of what is commonly termed ‘shovelware’ that result from this failure.
