1. Define Clear Objectives
If you don’t know where you want to go any road could take you there. This applies to eLearning Outsourcing equally well. If you are not clear about what you want from a particular eLearning project you can be sure no one else is either. The vendor will often create a sketchy picture of your goals and try and achieve that. That’s NOT what you want.

• Use well defined Statements of Work when outsourcing eLearning projects.  Detail the vendors’ and your responsibility as accurately as possible.
• Define the ‘level’ of output by using reference of previous projects (your or vendor’s). If you can add more details good. Just agreeing to something like ‘Level 2 output’ is fuzzy and will create confusion later.
• Study and understand the Project Scope Documents and Design Documents well before you sign them off. If you don’t understand them your vendor will be happy to walk you through the documents.
• Include any specific goals your senior management has from the program and articulate that for the vendor development team and yourself. If these come in late in the development cycle costs will escalate and timelines are sure to be affected.

2. Follow Process
You’ve checked the vendor’s process documents & maturity models and how they’ll work for your projects when you selected them. Now it’s time to allow the vendor to conform to that process and those models,  and for you to emulate them yourself. There are times when deadlines are advanced, and you may be tempted to skip that prototype stage. Skipping an earlier stage comes at cost – the quality or delivery dates suffer due to endless modifications and rework. Apart from the additional cost, it would also mean frustration for the development team. You need to stand by and conform to the process in the best interest of your project.

It’s very important to understand your role in the project process. Reviews & feedback on the many deliveries you receive along the way need time commitment from you. A Common mistake clients make is to assume it is a simple task and can be done quickly. Have someone capable & experienced to do that work. I suggest you check with your vendor during the kick-off stage about the time based project needs and at which stages. A day’s delay from your end could sometimes lead to more than a day’s delay from vendor’s end especially if you are not working with a dedicated team at the vendor.

3. Get the Communication Right
On outsourced projects sometime communication can become more important than the actual deliveries themselves. We’ve heard clients complaining that the lack of information bothers them more than the missed deliveries. At most times they feel confident of handling the situation if timely information is available about the status of the project rather than find out at the 11^th hour about deliveries being missed or delayed. But that’s something any responsible vendor should do.

It is important to setup proper communication channels and keep them open to create an environment of confidence & trust between your own team and the vendor’s development team. Signed off specifications documents and approved prototypes should not necessarily hold you from having discussions on new ideas that may emerge. Also provide constructive feedback whenever there’s an opportunity. This tends to prompt the vendor to commit even more to your project.

If you are working with a vendor on multiple projects have periodic review discussions to evaluate how the relationship is going. Iron out any persistent issues in the processes or otherwise. Be forthcoming in resolving your side of issues too.

4. Define and Measure Quality
Like beauty quality is subjective too.
While a sense of ‘quality’ should emerge from your defined objectives you still need to clearly spell out what you mean by quality. Understand your team’s and management’s collective expectation about quality and make sure your vendor knows and understands them clearly. Ensure to list individual details about features, elements and any other specifics of the program that you consider a part of good or acceptable quality. For instance some clients consider the amount of animation and interactivition to be an indicator of high quality while others don’t.

Quality is what TRULY affects the outcomes of the program in a real sense. A good quality product will have the intended learning impact on the audience. I suggest you focus on what the learners are supposed to ‘do’ or ‘perform’ after the program and whether that’s being achieved by the program.  While you may add several bells and whistles to an eLearning course, the core has to be solidly focused around achieving that single most important objective. The cost of bad eLearning is much higher than you think.

It’s a good idea to define the quality assessment criteria for a program and approve checklists the vendor will use for testing. This will the development team give output that’s closer to your expectations and will eventually require less number of iterations.

5. Think Long Term
As your organization grows, you will probably outsource eLearning projects more. Every time you work with a new vendor it’s a learning experience for both the teams as they come to understand each other and their unique working culture and style. After working together on a few projects the communication and understanding between the teams reaches a level where projects start to flow smoothly. It just does not make sense to switch vendors every now and then. Think of your vendor as a possible long term partner from the very beginning. Invest in building their understanding of your organization, how it functions, and what’s the short term and long term goals; the returns will be well worth the effort.

If you work with an innovative vendor, it helps your team to develop new thoughts and skills too. This in turn could help you sell your services better internally or to external clients. Encourage discussions with your vendor to explore advances in the field and how you could take advantage of them.

One way to greater involvement is to revamp the engagement model with your vendor from being just a ‘cost-reduction’ or ‘staff-augmentation’ option towards becoming a ‘strategic-partner’. Getting formal engagement model agreement in place helps vendor commit resources and energy to think about advancements for your organization holistically rather than just work on a per project basis. Think business performance improvement & strategic capability building beyond cost savings.

Lastly I feel you should remember that your partner needs to be profitable to remain in business for the long term and be a suitable strategic partner. Don’t splurge but be ready to pay for experience and expertise.

I believe these five keys can you help you reap the benefits of eLearning outsourcing to the fullest.

This post deals with the benefits of eLearning outsourcing.

Why outsource?

Significant cost advantages
Undoubtedly, this is one of the key reasons for you to even consider outsourcing. Outsourcing arrangements enable you to reduce fixed costs and leverage the scalability of the service providers. This study by Bersin Associates – Offshore eLearning: What Works, estimates savings between 20-40% by outsourcing to India. It could be even more in some cases. Whether you are a corporate or a training company, you could gain from outsourcing (parts or full) projects to India. Of course you would need to choose a good vendor (I will discuss how to do that in a subsequent post).

Scalability without headaches
Outsourcing could help your team to be scalable – on demand. You could engage a team of 5 or 50 or 500 depending on your needs without having to worry about hiring, retention, firing etc. The vendor would manage everything including their training and providing replacement resources. This is hugely important for smaller companies given the kind of business environment we find ourselves in. It also helps in starting projects quickly, ramping up the team much faster, sometimes even putting the project on hold without much additional costs.

Better quality through innovation
Your eLearning vendor is better placed to deliver better quality – assuming you selected a good vendor to start with – on a consistent basis. This is a natural outcome of the continuous improvement that happens as your vendor’s team handles more projects of different kinds for diverse clients. That experience helps them anticipate problems in advance, troubleshoot better when needed, and also propose value added inputs based on their previous experiences. Chances are you can rely on your vendor (much more than you can on your internal team) to be ready with cutting-edge solutions. It is their business and they would (well, should) invest in innovation.

Reduce project risk
When outsourcing, you need to define your project very well to get RFPs ready. That reduces the risk to a large extent as everything you need is in one document – most probably has agreement of key stakeholders as well. The development process is better managed by the vendor including proper documentation (specification sheets, test plans, project plans, IDD, storyboards – with proper versioning etc.) and pre-defined delivery / sign off process (prototypes, Alpha & Beta deliveries) ensuring success of the project. You could even consider risk diversification by distributing work between multiple vendors i.e. if you have significant volumes of work to justify having multiple vendors.

More reliability on project completion
Often the company that you outsource to does only eLearning development as its core business. Consequently, all its processes and systems are specifically defined and well geared up to deliver eLearning products / projects. There is almost no chance of those resources being diverted to some other ‘more important’ tasks. That’s common when working with internal project teams. This reliability could mean a lot for certain critical training programs.

Focus on core / strategic goals
Though I list this at the end, this is the most important benefit you would get from outsourcing. Outsourcing helps bring greater focus to the core or strategic tasks of your training function – without sacrificing quality or service. You would better spend your energies on planning for future about how the organization and its business is changing, what skills are required now (& in future), and how best to make those skills available; evaluating success of training programs mapping them against business results, improving the whole training and development function to align it with business needs; and implementing organization cultural change plans to get it ready for the coming decade. These are tasks which only you can perform.

If you have outsourced for any other reasons we would love to hear from you. Please do share any other thoughts too.

Here’s a screen grab of tag cloud for our posts:

Here is a list of some of the best posts of 2009:

Top 20 Most Viewed Posts
1. Top 100 Learning Game Resources
2. Top 47 eLearning & Workplace Learning Blogs
3. Top 50 Mobile Learning Resources
4. Our Top 10 Learning Tools 2009
5. The Ten Commandments of eLearning
6. Using Silverlight/Expression Blend for eLearning Development
7. Five Myths of Mobile Learning
8. Mobile Learning in India
9. eLearning Development: How long does it Really take?
10. eLearning Development India: Results of Salary Survey
11. Five Things Not to do While Selecting an LMS
12. eLearning Development India – The Unofficial Salary Survey 2009
13. HTML 5 and eLearning Development
14. eLearning Outsourcing to India will reach USD 603 million by 2012
15. Upside Learning Completes Five Years
16. Learning Management: What does a Training Company need an LMS for?
17. The Right Way To Go About Open Source LMS
18. Adobe Flash: Now With Face Recognition
19. Upside Board Game Exercise – Download the Winning Game
20. Patterns at Play – Fundamental to Games

Top Posts Category Wise:

Game Based Learning
1. Top 100 Learning Game Resources
2. Upside Board Game Exercise – Download the Winning Game
3. Patterns at Play – Fundamental to Games
4. Can Fun Help Change Behaviors?
5. These Are NOT Serious Games!

eLearning Development
1. eLearning Development: How long does it Really take?
2. eLearning Development India: Results of Salary Survey
3. eLearning Development India – The Unofficial Salary Survey 2009
4. eLearning Development: What’s new in Flash CS4
5. eLearning Development: 4 Tech Considerations When Using Videos

Mobile Learning
1. Top 50 Mobile Learning Resources
2. Five Myths of Mobile Learning
3. Mobile Learning in India
4. Google Goggles and Mobile Learning
5. Mobile Learning – Three Reasons for the Return of WAP

Learning Management
1. Five Things Not to do While Selecting an LMS
2. Learning Management: What does a Training Company need an LMS for?
3. The Right Way To Go About Open Source LMS
4. Seven Tips for an Easy and Effective LMS Switch
5. Top 5 reasons for implementing LMS: LC Survey

eLearning Outsourcing
1. eLearning Outsourcing to India will reach USD 603 million by 2012
2. Top 8 Reasons Why Training Providers Are Adopting eLearning
3. Training Companies Are Adopting eLearning
4. eLearning Outsourcing: Training Companies Turn to eLearning for Survival & Growth

Top 5 Posts That Received Most Comments
1. Top 47 eLearning & Workplace Learning Blogs
2. These Are NOT Serious Games!
3. Top 100 Learning Game Resources
4. Do You Learn More From Your Successes Than From Your Failures? (Please Opine)
5. Augmented Reality in Learning

Top 5 Posts That Were Most Tweeted
1. Top 100 Learning Game Resources
2. Top 50 Mobile Learning Resources
3. Top 47 eLearning & Workplace Learning Blogs
4. Blending Learning with Social Technology Components
5. Five Myths of Mobile Learning

Top 5 Traffic Sources
1. StumbleUpon
2. Google / Organic
3. Twitter
4. eLearning Learning
5. eLearning Technology

We would like to thank all our subscribers and readers. If you like reading our blog, we’d appreciate recommending it to your friends.

We wish you a joyous and prosperous 2010.

The event scheduled for Nov 20th in Mumbai will focus on how organizational learning can impact business. So what can you expect?

Excerpted from the CLO Summit brochure:

“A day filled with inspiring keynotes, a few crisp panel discussions, stimulating presentations.
And a few pleasant surprises.

In a fast changing economic environment with increasing competitive intensity, how can organizational learning become a source of competitive advantage and continuous change?

How can organizational learning, positively impact the business and proactively propel change in business strategy or ensure its effective implementation, instead of just reacting to it?

How can organizations use learning as a tool to innovate, differentiate themselves in order to attract and retain Talent, Customers and Investors?

The inaugural CLO summit shall endeavour to find answers to these questions and some of the key areas mentioned in the agenda through interaction and debate amongst some of the best minds in the field.”

We look forward to meeting some of you personally during the summit.

1. Client Demand: The provider’s clients have started demanding eLearning solutions (and training providers want to retain them). This is a pure survival and growth reason which I blogged about earlier. Undoubtedly, in the current economic situation there is a BIG push for training companies to move towards eLearning.
2. Cost of Training Delivery: To reduce cost of delivery for training companies and their clients. This is mentioned universally and has come into focus even more due to the recession where budgetary constraints (especially on travel) have impacted the off-take of classroom training in big way
3. Flexibility: Increase flexibility of access (anytime, anywhere). Most training companies mention it’s becoming difficult to pull employees out of their jobs for 2-5 day instructor-led sessions. With managers forced to do more with less people (several organizations have retrenched people) letting anyone off for even a day can become difficult.
4. Increase delivery options: Blended learning options to cater to the unique requirements of different clients. Some want more eLearning and some want less of it, others want mobile learning. This helps training providers reach client companies who otherwise had not been able to afford their classroom training – opening up a new stream of business. I’ve blogged before about why Blended Learning is the best option for training companies.
5. Improve efficiency: Improve efficiency & effectiveness of instructor led training with technology enabled components. Adding pre-workshop eLearning modules, post-workshop eLearning sessions (can be synchronous), mobile learning components for follow-ups that help increase retention. Using technology such as ARS (Audience Response Systems) in classrooms & providing collaborative environments can create learning opportunities for users. As training providers, they want to make their courses the ‘best in class’ using technology enabled learning affords them that opportunity.
6. Learning Management: Making management of reporting easier and be able to check off some important checkboxes (guess more relevant to compliance type training). As the paradigm shifts, Learning Management Systems will change and focus would be on truly managing learning and not just checkbox compliance.
7. It is better now: ELearning has improved since the time they last considered it. There is NO doubt about this; eLearning has come a long way. The addition of games, simulations, mobile based learning, social learning frameworks, collaborative tools and much more has come to instructional technology.  Rather than simple page-turners the industry is slowly turning to provide instructional experiences, both interactive and online.
8. Am I late: Don’t want to miss the boat. Well none of our prospects said this but it seems to be the overriding feeling amongst training providers. All of them realize that the days of classroom-training only are limited and they’d better start now.

The common theme emerging from these meetings is that their clients have started asking for eLearning solutions or blended solutions. As an owner of a small training company said –“My clients could have stopped training last year and I could have been in big trouble” (his actual statement). Resonating but with a different tone some of bigger training companies mention –“We need to consider eLearning to maintain our leadership position and avoid losing clients. It helps make our offerings more competitive in the marketplace. It also helps us appear more progressive offering all possible options of training delivery.” (my interpretation of their statements)

That doesn’t surprise us at all. We’ve foreseen this kind of growth in demand for eLearning in the wake of recent widespread recession (which is not over yet!). Last quarter we saw growing indications of Training Companies Adopting eLearning and now we see that trend gaining momentum. We actually expect eLearning to grow well over the next couple of years and beyond.  We’re not suggesting face–to-face training is dead. It’s just that eLearning is growing and you need to sit up and take notice. We’d recommend Training Companies take a hard look at how the training market is re-shaping itself and how eLearning is beginning to take centre stage in the training portfolio of many organizations. It would be prudent to re-align your offering to suit your clients changing needs in order to retain your client-base.

If you’ve no experience with eLearning development yourself, you could align with an eLearning development vendor like us. Conduct some basic website review, sample reviews, reference checks, cost analysis, and even a small pilot. Even if your current clients are not demanding eLearning right now, it may make sense to develop eLearning options just to be ready. Of course, it makes sense to start small and gain some experience of how it works.

Needless to say we are happy to help if you have any questions or need assistance. Please feel free to write a comment here or email at info@upsidelearning.com.

Current Openings

We are looking for senior, experienced professionals in Instructional Design (Learning Designer), Visual Design (Visualizer, Sr. Graphic Designer, Art Director), Flash Programming (Lead Programmers), and Project Management (Sr. PM & Account Managers). If you have a flair for developing great custom eLearning and delivering projects with a customer focused mindset, please send in your resumes to careers@upsidelearning.com.

Why should you join Upside Learning?

Well, you would get a sense of who we are, what we do, and how we think by reading through our blog and website. To add to that here are some good reasons for considering Upside Learning as a long term employment option:

-    Emerging Leaders in Training Outsourcing 2009 (Visit TrainingIndustry.com Listing)
-    Great quality custom eLearning (winner of 4 Apex awards in last 3 years)
-    Learning Design and Delivery is primary & only business (not a side business)
-    Professional, young organization (5+ years young – View Milestones)
-    Growth Opportunities (we are the fastest growing learning solutions company in India)
-    Focus on Innovation (dedicated Innovation & New Projects Team)

If you know of someone who might be interested in these positions, please email this information to them. Thanks for your help.

Training companies now need to enable themselves with the tools and technologies needed to go online with their training material and find the right systems and backend partners to support them during and after this crucial exercise. An appropriate Learning Management System (LMS) is the key to the successful execution of this piece of strategy. Because having a good system means being able to keep customers happy and delighted and also because what most training companies need is a system that runs robustly and has excellent support.

At Upside Learning, we have over 50 training companies as customers and believe that we know a thing or two about what kind of LMS a Training Company needs. Of course, some companies may need a little more or a little less but what I am outlining below serves as the typical set of features and functionalities required. This set has been prepared not only from what we have offered to our customers so far but also includes intelligence from the market as a whole.

Who’s who in the LMS?
For the purpose of this post I am focusing on the premise that training companies will be using the LMS to host and deliver/sell their own training content online to their existing and new customers (or individual users).

They need a system that lets them have the freedom to set up customer accounts on the system easily and almost instantly with basic settings that can be configured through the interface itself. This means that the right system should have at least three distinct entities (or profiles) – LMS Administrator (Training Company); Client Administrator (Someone at customer’s end to manage their activities); Learner / User (Learner at customer’s end).

These three profiles ensure that both the training company and the customer can work on the system without much dependence on the LMS vendor or the training company for routine tasks like license management, course management, reporting, learner support for basic queries, eCommerce, etc.

Key point: The LMS system must support a multi-portal structure where the training company itself can create an account for a customer and the system automatically creates a portal for it.

Hosting and Support
Since the core business of a training company is offering training, what they need from the LMS vendor is a complete package on hosting and support. These two eventually form the backbone of the entire offering as the company needs to be absolutely certain about the reliability and availability of the system along with best-of-class support before they approach their customers. Eventually amongst customers, their reputation is at stake and being able to rely on the LMS vendor completely is a MUST. Most training companies seem to prefer the vendor host and support the LMS.

Talking about Support in particular we have seen that even though we have the capabilities to offer direct support to end users, a few training companies like to keep Level 1 support at their end and then utilize our support as second line. This is linked to the requirement on white-labeling (mentioned further in this post) where the company wants to go as a self-sustaining provider to its customers. However the LMS vendor needs to set up proper systems and training for the company to provide support.

Branding of the system
Most of our customers have wanted the system to be white-labeled (which means that the LMS carries no reference to the actual developer/vendor and is branded entirely as a system belonging to the company). Considering it involves cost some companies are good to go with a system which carries their main branding with a reference to the vendor. The flexibility to offer a white-labeled system, even at additional cost, is a big plus. This may become a key discussion point if the company has strong views on getting it white-labeled.

Standards Compliance
The LMS must support SCORM and AICC standards. If the LMS also supports upload and delivery of a proprietary format (HTML pages without any compliance) or videos which have not yet been packaged as SCORM / AICC courses it is a bonus for the company as it entails no additional cost to convert those to a standards-compliant courseware. However it still means certain integration costs and may also mean losing out on the inherent advantages of using standards.

Functionality Modules
In terms of the functionality modules, companies like to keep the entire system simple and easy to use and do not have a big list of functionalities required:

It’s not just requisite to have these features in the LMS but imperative that the LMS system does not offer other extra features which can become more of a distraction to both the training company and the end client. However it is very important that the LMS system does have scale-up capabilities to add on modules for many other activities as the business of training specially online training keeps evolving and training companies come back to ask for modules on virtual classroom, social media, collaboration tools, competency management, etc.

In a nutshell, what a training company needs today is a ready to go system without the frills and that concentrates on core training delivery activities. In the eyes of the training company and their customers, what they are eventually selling to their customers is not an LMS but more of a training solution (which is primarily their content) through an easy to use and robust platform which doesn’t need to have fancy features. For this reason, the LMS should remain the key technology enabler making it easier to remain focused on their core business.

We have been listed as an Emerging Leader in Training Industry, Inc.’s 2009 list of “Emerging Leaders in Training Outsourcing”.

This list includes 15 top companies worldwide who, based on Training Industry, Inc.’s assessment, “are recognized industry leaders that have demonstrated innovation and excellence in providing outsourced learning services in selected business process categories and are poised to increase their level of services to clients”.

The list is compiled to provide businesses, government agencies, and training companies seeking learning solutions partners with a short list of reliable and proven training and eLearning outsourcing companies. This can help them to make more informed decisions and procure high-quality learning services.

This is a significant milestone for us, and our team is thrilled that we have been listed as an Emerging Leader.

Click here to view the complete list.