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Here are a few of the questions businesses most commonly ask us:
- How do we get started in e-learning?
The best thing to do to get started is to get together with a reputable e-learning developer (did we mention that we do this sort of thing?) to do a whiteboard session about your requirements, and perhaps more importantly, your organisational limitations.
If you bring along your subject matter experts, any training documentation you already use, perhaps an IT person, and if at all possible a branding person from your Marketing area, we can cover most of the issues we need to cover to get you a proposal – that should give you a chance to see what our ideas are in solving this…
We recommend starting small, with a project which is important to your organisation, but which is small enough to be completed quickly. It is very important to get runs on the board quickly – and to get support at the budget level.
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- What do we do with our current instructor-led courses?
Most of our clients re-purpose their instructor-led courses, or at least the ones that can be effectively delivered via e-learning.
More and more of our clients these days are moving to blended learning solutions – e.g. the use of e-learning with instructor-led training courses, tutors, online discussions, external resources, etc.
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- How does a typical project work?
How a project is conducted is probably the most important aspect of the quality you get in your training module.Like most professional developers, we follow a quality assurance software development life cycle which ensures a lot of things happen at the right time – quality assurance, design signoffs, reducing confusion over specifications, and so on.
Our software development life cycle is built around two important premises: 1) your team learns what it wants as it goes, so change control is built into the cycle.We decided long ago that this is real life in software development, so change is part of what we need to be good at; and 2) that your team needs to constantly see what it is getting, so multiple reviews are built into the life cycle.
Why is this good for you?You and your team learn a whole lot about the development process, and get better at it, which makes the cost of future modules lower!
To make it simple, we have the following project phases:
- a Project Start / Requirements phase, where we have a series of meetings in which we set project resources, detailed project requirements, schedules, plans, and extensively interview your team about learning outcomes, instructional choices – you can imagine there’s a lot to talk about here.
In this phase, we also perform a test installation of the technologies we have agreed to use – IT people don’t like surprises, so we try not to give them any…
- a Design / Prototype phase, where we do 3 important things: 1) we create a general design to solve the requirements of the project; 2) we create lots of choices for you in an interface design and fine tune this until it looks (and more importantly, works) right; 3) we determine parts of the training to be incorporated into a prototype module, and build a prototype for your team’s review, which you get to take away, change a bit, and sign off on.
A prototype is a fully designed, working model of one part of your module, and it should be complete enough for you to “test” all of the design assumptions which you and the developer have made thus far: navigation, look and feel, writing tone, interactivity, tracking – everything!
No matter what developer you use, always demand to review a working prototype of the module!It’s the only way for your team to be sure about what they’re getting!
After the prototype is reviewed, adjusted and improved, we finish writing the design of the remainder of the module – based upon what we’ve learned from your earlier reviews.
- a phase, where we put the entire design through full production, perform unit testing on all parts of the development, and integration testing when we put the pieces together.
- a Delivery phase, where we perform a full system test on all units of development, package, document and deliver the full product for your Acceptance test; and
- a Project Rollout phase, where we assist you with the rollout and implementation of the module in your learning audience.There is a lot of preparatory work that goes into this, of course, and it starts as early as the Project Start / Requirements phase.
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- How long does a typical project take?
A lot depends, of course, on the availability of the material you have to start with, the availability of client subject matter experts, and the type of media planned to be used.
Typically a one-hour interactive module takes between four to six weeks to develop, but we’ve done projects in as short as two weeks.We even offer a project discount incentives to our clients who can keep up with the agreed time schedule (meaning reviews).
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- How much time will we need to plan for our resources in a typical project?
As we determine your requirements, we outline exactly how much time we anticipate will be required from you.Usually we require most of this in the early stages of the project as we make the important design decisions and gather your input regarding the content.
Typically we would require time from a Project Manager, your subject matter experts, an IT contact, and a Branding or Marketing representative.
We’re quite experienced at minimising the time we take from you. As we deliver versions of the final product to you throughout the project (usually prototype, acceptance and final), we will need a review team you determine to do prompt and thorough reviews.We use these reviews to fine-tune the product for your learning audiences.
So how much:a good rule of thumb is 5 project management days per hour of content (not including internal rollout time); 5 subject matter expert days per hour of content; 1 IT day per installation (plan at least 2 per module); and .5 branding days per hour of content.
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- How much does a typical project cost?
You know what we’re going to say – it depends on that particular length of string…Actually, the length of the string is pretty easy to predict – it’s how interesting and amazing you want the string to be.
But here are some guidelines:an hour of custom-built interactive training, depending upon the level of interactivity and media utilised, can cost anywhere from $10,000 to the high 30k’s, and even more, depending on the type of media used (audio, video, animation).
Of course, the first hour is more expensive than additional hours, since that’s where all the foundational stuff (like interfaces, learning strategies, navigation, etc.) is worked out. For subsequent hours you can save somewhere between 15 – 20%.
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- Why does customised interactive training cost so much more than the IT courses we lease from SkillSoft?
There’s a simple answer for this.
Custom interactive training has to be developed to your specific requirements specification – most of the cost of a custom project is dedicated to ensuring that the final learning product addresses all of your learning objectives, talks in the right way to your learners, is easy for your specific learners to use, and essentially works for you – not for every company in your industry.
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- Do we need a learning management system (“LMS”) before we do a project?
Not necessarily.We are asked this question a lot, primarily because of the rather large investment LMS’s require.
Courses today can be built to a specification such as AICC or SCORM, which allows it to run in most LMS’s, when you make the decision to purchase one.
If you make SCORM compliance (probably the safest standard to follow these days) a requirement in the development of your custom courses, you should be right.
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- What areas does e-learning work well in?
e-learning is not a replacement for all of your current training.
It can be valuable to look at where your trainers add the most value, which is often not in the repetitive delivery of information, but rather in the subsequent discussion of material and the relating of the content to your employees day to day roles.
e-learning tends to work well in parts of orientation training, information-intensive parts of product training, procedural training, compliance training, systems simulation training – in short, anything which is knowledge intensive.
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- How do we measure the return on our investment?
Return on investment is one area in which e-learning comes into its own, especially with a decentralised workforce.
It is interesting, however, that many of the organisations embracing e-learning cite cost savings (travel, employee down-time, etc.) as only one of many reasons to incorporate online learning. Today, many organisations are considering broader business impact: increased learning can improve sales, customer service and employee retention.
Contact us if you need assistance in putting together an ROI for your project.
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- Can we maintain the e-learning modules once they are built?
Yes -- in fact, that’s a really smart way to keep the ongoing costs of interactive modules down.
As a part of the project, we can train one of your people how to do the more simple types of maintenance, such as changing text, and how to repackage and redistribute the course. We have what we call a “Head Start” program, where, in order to train one of your people, we actually include them in our project team, and give them a real assignment in the project – it’s really the best way for them to learn – put them on the line, so to speak
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- Won’t the e-learning quickly get out of date?
Not if you make one of your requirements the maintenance of data in the modules which can change often (this is called “dynamic data.”
You have a choice in your project:
- if you have web development skills in your group, you can make the changes yourself (there are a few things about change managementand release control which needs to be conveyed first);
- if you want an administrator (without web development skills) to make changes, change management capabilities need to be incorporated into your project – this may make the project slightly more expensive, but will pay off in a lower maintenance cost, over the life of the module; or
- if you don’t want to make any changes, you will need to use your developer to do so – this can be quite expensive over time, so do consider one of the first two options!
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- What types of skill sets do we need to create e-learning?
Generally your team can create its own e-learning courseware, but it will need a wide range of skills: instructional design, project management, graphical design, web development, release management, quality control and quality assurance, audio/video (if applicable), database and information architecture.
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- Are the e-learning development tools worthwhile as an investment?
This is an area which is very important to learn a lot about.
There are many e-learning development tools on the market which purport to make it easy to create e-learning courses quickly and cheaply.The good ones do a good job of helping you to create simple courses (these are often called “cookie-cutter courseware”), but it is important that you understand the limitations of the tools.
Unfortunately, the vendors will not readily tell you this information (some of them have never built anything with the tools anyway, so they may not know!), and their reference sites are often price-incented to provide happy stories and testimonials (yes, the world can be an awful place).
Many of these products are purchased for upwards of $20 – 25,000, and after an initial go by an initial project team, they are placed upon the proverbial shelf.
Their main limitations?
- If you create a course using them, you cannot modify anything in the course outside of what the tool lets you modify, and if you do, your changes can be lost (since the tool you used to create the course doesn’t know about your changes).
- New releases of the e-learning development tools are often not compatible with earlier versions, which can mean you have to continually upgrade your older courses.You have to upgrade or you lose your support – remember that game?
- The courses created, because they use the same templates again and again, tend to be fairly boring to learners – your first foray into e-learning may just turn your learners off, perhaps forever.
- These products have a specific learning architecture implicit in their structures – something very hard to pick out when you’re evaluating the products.This means that you are being sold some very basic and in some situations, very old, ideas about what learning should look like.Let the buyer beware.
Our suggestion? If you want to make your e-learning courseware inexpensive and easy to create, invest instead in a set of customised e-learning templates and get someone on your team trained in how to use them.
It may cost a bit more up front, but it will decrease the total cost of your course production, since the likelihood of success of the courses is much higher (remember, the templates were designed specifically for your learning styles and your learners?), and the cost of maintenance will be lower.
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- What are the cultural issues in making e-learning effective as a training tool?
This topic is worthy of a book. Suffice it to say for now that the quality of the job you and your team do in rollout and implementation is everything – the launch of the module has to be supported by management, tracked, encouraged, and re-encouraged.
The quality of the learning has to be good. It is essential that learners are always able to tell where they are, where they are going, and where they’ve been – that they can stop and restart at a later time, without losing their progress, that their prior learning is recognised and counted.
It is helpful if the learning is tracked and tied to an employee’s skill level, and perhaps advancement.It is helpful if learners have an online help desk or online tutor, in case they have questions. It is helpful if unsophisticated computer users have practice modules which help them.
Finally, your executive needs to be fully behind the e-learning initiative – not simply to lower training costs, but to increase the speed and effect of learning within the organisation.
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- What budget should we allocate for future upgrades and maintenance?
This will vary from project to project and will depend upon how regularly information changes.
However, a ballpark figure might be approximately 20% per year for content upgrades.
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- Who owns the rights to the materials created in an e-learning project?
This is an area that supports many, many lawyers world-wide, but essentially you own the rights to the materials you bring to the project – that is, the content and supporting materials – and the developer owns the rights to the software “models” it brings to the project.
Software developers cannot resell the module they develop for you, unless they have negotiated specific rights to do so, but they do retain the “intellectual property” they accumulate by working on the project
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- What technologies are needed to run e-learning?
We’re basically software developers who find the right hammer to use for a particular nail -- in other words, we use the technology that’s most appropriate to the job at hand.
We have done a lot of work with Macromedia products, like Authorware, Flash and Dreamweaver, and use standard web technologies, like HTML, dynamic HTML, JavaScript, and products like Cold Fusion and ASP to connect to databases.
The good news is that 1) we provide you with “run time” code that will be tested repeatedly in the project to operate in your environment, and 2) we test early and repeatedly (3 times).
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- We’ve tried CBT before and it wasn’t very popular – what can be done to make this stuff work?
Well, there’s CBT, and there’s effective learning.
We’re not sure what happened with your previous experiences, but we do a lot of work with companies who are trying to ensure that any e-learning developed for them works successfully within their organisations – there are tremendous cultural issues as you’re aware…
Perhaps the best way to have a look at whether we’re any different is to have a brief whiteboard session to talk about it – we’d love to get some of your feedback on what you think went wrong with your earlier projects…
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