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Hi Sarah,
Thanks for this.
It’s a handy rebuttal of those pesky three myths about e-learning (cheap / easy / quick) and it provides a useful, if imprecise, categorisation of e-learning development types into basic, interactive and advanced.
Good for planners to bear in mind. Converting PowerPoints, adding voice and some quizzes is a much more predictable, if duller, outcome than setting up green rooms and/or going to town on animations and / or commissioning video. Also good to have the breakdown
of the development processes (analysis, design, storyboarding, media production, coding, QA, project management, SME reviews, piloting) .
Some provisos: It’s a 2010 presentation. Lots of things have changed.
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Tools have got better and quicker and development timelines speeded up.
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Unless the e-learning concept is just convert a PPT and add a voiceover, I would question the differentiation between basic and interactive types. Good authoring tools (like Articulate Storyline) now
come with plenty of tools to add quizzes and low level animation. In a development perspective that doesn’t take much time. The issue from a HE perspective is conceptual – knowing that such and such content or interactivity type is possible and providing frameworks
for writers and editors to create that content. To that end I developed an instructional design manual aimed at the editors and SMEs for the courses we are working on here in the Institute of Ophthalmology who are mostly clinicians.
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The timings quoted have plenty of padding which is more 2010 and useful for HR departments to justify budgets. The main one to bear in mind is
nearly all e-learning of publishable standard will have a 40:1 ratio i.e. 40 development hours for each instructional hour of content. Even a pre-existing PowerPoint will take 30:1
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The upper end timings of 700:1 are outmoded: There are lots cheap on-demand tools such as goanimate for creating mini situational videos. We can also make acceptable quality videos of processes with
nothing more than an iPhone. No green room or camera crews required for either. That said, if anyone proposes using a new technology without working through exactly how it supports pedagogy, materials development and assessment, then schedules and budgets
can go haywire.
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Another point is the type of content being developed in 2010 – compliance driven (captive audience), often clunky, very dull, locked inside an LMS has moved on. While there is still plenty of lamentable
content being developed, corporate training has done lots of work on make e-learning more applied and relevant (so called 70:20:10 model), more to the point (micro learning), more social (rise of the ‘social learning platforms like teachable.com), more accessible
(mobile authoring tools and apps). All of those are areas that Higher Ed could learn from as it asks learning technologies to move from technology support into e-learning course development.
Paul
Paul Sweeney
Instructional Designer
Education Department
UCL Institute of Ophthalmology
11 – 43 Bath Street, London, EC1V 9EL
t: 02076086875