FEATURE
Rapid E-learning
A Quicker Approach to Courseware

THANKS TO SOME EASY-TO-USE DEVELOPMENT TOOLS, SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS CAN BE A LOT MORE HELP IN CREATING TRAINING FOR TIME-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS.
Fall 2004
By Josh Bersin
Elearning!

The number-one challenge e-learning developers face is that it takes too long to develop a course. Time is often the enemy of a training program. As time marches on, the business challenge continues to grow — and often the training problem itself will change.

For example, suppose your job is to build a sales-certification program for a major
new product release. You need to reach out to several thousand salespeople and
resellers quickly. But you also know that six-to-nine months from now there will be an
update release, and probably new features and pricing. By the time you get your course published, will it be out of date? Also, the product managers (subject matter expert SMEs) are busy — how can you get enough of their time? You need them now.

This example is common in nearly every organization. Sometimes the problem is a
product launch; other times it is a new regulation, a merger, or a major new corporate
initiative. There are two aspects to the time challenge:
Time to build: Can I build the content fast enough to meet the business demand?
Shelf life:Will the content be current and relevant long enough to justify the investment?

In addition to the time required to develop courseware, there is the time needed to integrate, test, produce, and launch courseware.Most companies require integration of the courseware into their learning management system (LMS). This process alone often takes weeks and sometimes requires specialized technology skills — even if the courseware is AICC or SCORM compliant. If the IT group is busy, this process may take 30 days or longer to complete.

THE ANSWER: RAPID E-LEARNING
Rapid e-learning is a whole new category of content that can be built in days, using off the-shelf, easy-to-use tools.With rapid e-learning, SMEs can author content, using instructional templates, graphics, fonts, and images developed by a central training or web development group.

Unlike traditional e-learning, rapid e-learning programs can be developed so quickly that they can be considered disposable. If the business problem changes, you can afford to take them offline and redo them easily.

Several tools enable rapid e-learning development. Examples include Breeze and Captivate from Macromedia, Trivantis Lectora, and Articulate Presenter. Breeze, for instance, builds on Microsoft PowerPoint, giving subject matter experts and instructional designers the ability to use existing content and easily add sound, assessments, and animations. With Breeze, users familiar with PowerPoint can publish to the web in a few minutes without any training in web development.

Captivate uses a similar approach by letting developers capture actual screen shots and mouse movements to build instructional content focused on PC and web applications. Instead of telling someone how to use a software application, Captivate empowers the instructional designer to show precisely what to do. All of these tools follow a similar approach in that they give subject matter experts an easy way to build instruction quickly. Content is published in Flash format and can then be modified and extended by web developers when necessary.

Instructional designers and web developers still build templates, graphics, logos, and fonts that are shared among content publishers. But the actual content-development work is done by subject matter experts, not web designers. This removes the bottleneck experienced with the traditional development approach.

WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNERS?
The biggest criticism of this approach comes from traditional instructional designers: “You mean we are going to let subject matter experts develop their own training content? They have no background in instructional design.What if they just develop rapid junk that has no instructional impact?”

This is a fair criticism. However, in practice, what we find is that instructional designers (ID) still play a critical role.

In some organizations it is the ID who builds the templates and guidelines, and is responsible for the final edits to guarantee that content is effective and consistent. Subject matter experts need coaching and an outline to ensure that the content they build is easy to follow, jargonfree, and written in language easily understood by the audience. These guidelines should come from an ID.

If you are an instructional designer, your role in this process is to build the templates, processes, and coaching tools that let SMEs build content quickly and effectively. Often your role will be to add assessments and publish content that is developed quickly by others. You can now leverage your skills and background across a larger number of programs and a larger audience of content developers.

HOW DOES RAPID E-LEARNING AFFECT ME?
This new approach will have a dramatic effect on your organization. If you are in a training function, you now have a new bag of tricks to use for time-critical problems.

If you are a web developer, these new tools will enable you to off-load more time-critical development tasks directly to SMEs and instructional designers. You can then add Flash animations and other more sophisticated interactive elements to these programs without having to build basic instructional content.

If you are an instructional designer, these techniques free you to think more broadly. You should be developing templates and processes for editing and publishing content. You might create your own taxonomy of training challenges to help decide when to use rapid e-learning and when to use blended or other approaches.

Josh Bersin is the president and founder of Bersin & Associates in Oakland, CA, a research and consulting firm specializing in e-learning. For more information on this topic, including a research report titled “Rapid E-Learning: What Works,” visit www.bersin.com.

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