Building courses fast

There is more to speeding up the turn-around than using specific tools. The real key is to design the development process for fast turn-around. Several of our customers have used the "Content Factory" approach, and have been able to move from creating 50 courses per year to 450 without adding personnel.

The first step is to decide which courses are "traditional" and which are "rapid". Traditional course will have a longer shelf-life, so one can afford to include more high-production elements. These courses can take up to 2 months to create. Rapid courses are for fast-moving material. They can be created in a matter of hours. The key to the fast turn-around is to dispense with high-production elements like professional multimedia and voice overs.

Traditional course creation typically requires that the content/text people deliver their material to the graphic artists who then assemble the courses with high visual production costs/values.

The course production for rapid content separates the "visual" element, staffed by graphic designers and the "textual" or "content" portion. A tool like the ReadyGo Web Course Builder allows the subject matter experts or the "text" people to assemble the graphics with the content and output the course in a few hours. This way, instead of requiring 2 months for 2 people to create a course, one individual can create a course in a single day. Graphic elements are re-used. They surround the text, which contains the primary information. By implementing the primary content as text rather than graphics (e.g. Flash) the courses can be maintained and updated much more quickly.

Cost justiyfing an LMS

The costs of LMSs are typically much higher than advertised. A rule of thumb is 1x for the hardware, 2x for the software, and 3x for installation services (and that doesn't include content conversion.) That is, if you paid $50K for the hardware on which you ran the software, you would need to pay $100K for the software, and then $200K additional for installation, configuration, and running of the software.

With LMSs, the typical installation process takes 2-3 years. They need to merge their database system with your company's database. This requires custom consulting services since the database designs are usually quite different. This cost needs to be factored in. However, if you want to use the LMS as an independent system (that is, every time someone gets hired or leaves your company, you have to record this fact on your LMS rather than inheriting it from the enterprise employee system), then you can reduce the installation process to a 1-2 month period.

When choosing an LMS, it is important to define your needs, rather than deciding what LMS-vendor-provided-features you'd like. For example, the majority of LMSs will only store a single score and a single pass/fail status for each student/course. So, after you spend many 100's of thousands of dollars, you still won't be able to use the LMS to carry out a survey or see why nobody got higher than 90% on a particular course (was it a bad question? Did you not cover the information in your course?). Before investing in a full LMS, I recommend starting off with a testing assessment system that has full reporting capabilities. For a few thousand dollars you will get a much better idea of your needs.

And then, there is the cost of converting courseware. I have seen no cases where off-the-shelf courseware (e.g. MS-Office Basics, Accounting Basics, etc.) are used at the levels envisioned. Typical usage that I have seen is about 15% of what was desired. Most training content is custom to the company. So, you should become familiar with course creation. In doing so, I recommend taking a course on web instructional design (or visit http://www.readygo.com/isd). There are many factors about the web experience that need to be taken into account in order to get return-on-investment for your courses. Simply converting PowerPoint and adding an audio track will be very easy and inviting to the course authors, however, will be a repellent to the company's employees. When viewing web courses, the more control you give the user, the more efficient they will be (in zeroing in on the content they need), the higher their satisfaction, and the higher the chance that you will earn back the cost of your investment. If they have to sit through 1 hour of an automated slide show, of which they already know 90% of the content, you have just wasted 54 minutes of their time, and learners will not forget this the next time you offer them eLearning.

Not my post - but worthwhile reading

I think this article is worth spending a few minutes on:

http://www.codeproject.com/News.aspx?nwid=6996

Al

Quick and dirty Office converters

What I (and learners) find unsatisfactory is the tools that take a
single Word document, turn it into a single-page course, put in the
minimum SCORM API initialize/finish calls, build a 10 line XML manifest
pointing to a single file, and then call this a "SCORM course".  The course creators
goal appears to be SCORM Conformance, rather than instruction.  I also
find LMSs that only track the very minimum required by the specification
to be a disservice.  For many course authors, whose goal is to get the
"SCORM Conformant" deliverable off their desk, this kind of tool is
certainly attractive.  From the studies our customers have done
(comparing these approaches to instructionally sound tools), the
learners are quite unhappy with it.  I think people can do better than
the bear minimum.

The specifications (SCORM/AICC) are available so that you can create
useful courses, so that you can see what the students are doing, and so
that you can tune your course based on how the students perform.  The
ReadyGo tool has been tested with lots of LMSs.  We have seen what they
can and can't do and have customized our interfaces (available to all
customers) for many of the LMSs in order to take advantage of the
different implementations.  (The author only needs to select a different
LMS from a pull-down menu.  The tool does all the other necessary work.)

A large number of LMSs only store the very minimum required by the
specifications.  There are a few LMSs that actually go to the effort of
capturing the student's responses - and a few of them even provide
reasonable reports to the course administrator.

Quick and dirty Office converters can produce "SCORM
conformant" content.  What I question is whether they produce good
training.  I also can't see that the effort has been made to take
advantage of different behaviors that are achievable within the
specifications.  I just think that "Lowest Common Denominator"
approaches will produce employees functioning at the lowest levels.  I
also think it will scare learners away from eLearning - a few years ago
I took an on-line course that was mostly audio.  Unfortunately, the
computer I was using didn't have speakers.  I took the test without
reading the content, and considered the whole exercise a waste of
time...and I had additional motivation to see what they had done with
the course implementation-wise.  Scaring people away from on-line
training by creating bad content is a good way to guarrantee your own
unemployment in the long run.

Al Moser
ReadyGo

About authoring tools

Within eLearning, I believe that there are certain tasks that will not
be accessible to the generalist user - primarily graphic arts work.
However, the tools available are now enabling the Subject Matter Expert
to be able to do something they previously could not: create coherent,
well implemented, multi-page content.  The standards (SCORM/AICC) aren't
 changing how development is being done - but they do help make it
possible to track more, different content using a variety of LMSs.
(These standards are relatively young.)

A good approach is to give tools to the SME/Instructional Designer so
that they can input, maintain, and update the textual content of the
courses.  Good tools also allow them to manage additional
graphics/multimedia created by specialists in those areas, without
burdening the SME/ID with graphic work.  There are still many tools
(advertized as "easy to use") out there that are only accessible to a
graphic designer in order to do the textual content.  This is a problem
because graphic designers with instructional design and subject matter
expertise are hard to find.

The real value for the standards are, and will be:
1. Interoperability of content (communication for tracking)
2. (Currently becoming available:) Communication to allow more dynamic
content (a database-driven server-based system can alter paths of
instruction)
3. (Future:) Interesting ways to combine content and provide more data
exchange.

Fake SCORM limitations that mask LMS or authoring tool limitations

A number of people think there are SCORM limitations when the real limitation is the LMS or authoring tool who then blames it on SCORM.  One of my favorite fake limitations has to do with screen size. There is nothing in the SCORM specification that requires a fixed size
screen.  The concept of the fixed size screen is a hold-over (with
enormous inertia) from the print paradigm.  That is, graphic designers
have gotten accustomed to specifying layout of every pixel of every
letter with respect to fixed size pages.  Most tools have been adapted
to this concept: to maintain the precise duplication between the
authoring environment and what the page looks like at delivery,
regardless of student's settings, you have to specify a fixed size.
However, this is really bad web etiquette:
1. Pages either take up too much of the screen (requiring horizontal
scrolling to read a single line) or too little (a small box within a
larger screen area).
2. Accessibility and respect for student's browser default settings are
ignored.  If a user wants his default font size to be 20pt, but the
course is built with the print paradigm, their desire will be ignored.
Then, it will be difficult for them to read the content.
3. Content doesn't rearrange if the student wants to put their course in
one half of the screen so that they can work on other tasks in the other
half.

Please see the ReadyGo authoring tool that creates SCORM conformant
courses that resize to the student's browser size.  If you want to, you
can also select a template that uses a fixed size screen.

Getting courses out fast

As with PowerPoint content creation, the fastest way to handle the turn-around and review cycles is to let the subject matter expert drive. That is, if the SME is in charge of assembling, editing, and publishing the content, you will get the fastest turn-around. However, for this to be effective, the process has to be broken down. In PPT production, the level and use of graphics/multimedia is typically minimal. For web content/eLearning, people want to do a lot more. The difficulty is that SMEs are not typically good at creating multimedia (nor should they be).

Typically the solution to this limitation is then to have the graphics/multimedia experts create the courseware, however, now you are stuck with several problems:
1. Lack of familiarity with the content: Inappropriate graphics/multimedia end up being incorporated into the course
2. Desire by the graphic artists to show off: They want to show what they are capable of doing. This drives up the costs, and is contrary to "rapid" concepts.
3. Communication breakdowns between SME and implementer. We all know about the 20 iterations due to the spell-checker that replaces the correct technical term with one that is a more common, but closely spelled word.

The SME can be empowered to be the manager/assembler of content, but there is a little bit of training and up-front assignment of tasks that needs to be carried out.
1. Most SMEs are comfortable with PPT, and don't want to move past this one-dimensional, face-to-face presentation style. With eLearning, the content has to be 3-dimensional (hierarchical page structure, plus links to other resources) so that a self-study environment is successful. (If you handed out your 3x5 speaker notes with a recording of you reading the content, would people find this engaging?) The SME has to provide multiple presentations of the same content so that people with different learning styles can adapt the content to their needs. This actually is not that difficult to explain to SMEs.
2. Separate the task of graphic/multimedia creation. The SME can provide descriptions of what additional visuals they want that can augment the content. (Flying bullets and page transitions are visually distracting and do not provide additional information. A moving flow diagram might be useful, as would a blow-up of an assembly.)
3. A standard look-and-feel template needs to be decided ahead of time. Otherwise, the SME will end up spending all their time trying to figure out which layout for the content they want. What I mean by this, is that they will fixate on placing a forward arrow 3 pixels up on one page and 3 pixels left on the other, and never implement the content of interest. Keep in mind that with eLearning (if done properly) there is no need for the content to control the learner's environment -- that is, your content should adjust to the end-user's screen preferences rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all screen size and content size on the learners. Learners like the web because they control where and what they see. If you take the control away from them, they will lose interest in the courses you are trying to provide.

Then, with a proper tool that does the bookkeeping for how the pages are managed, how the tables of contents are built, etc. an SME can actually control the process. Since the SME is the expert in the material, the fastest production will occur when they can create, control, and revise the material. We have found that people with a journalism approach akin to the nightly news are excellent at creating and managing rapid eLearning. In contrast, people whose approach is more like a full length feature movie production are more appropriately applied to traditional eLearning (CBT delivered over the web). Our customers have reported being able to produce 20 courses in one month with a staff of 1 person using the above rapid approach. Previously, they were using a traditional approach that yielded 1 course per month per developer.