The e-learning industry is booming, what's that mean for instructional designers (IDs)?

According to this piece by Forbes, the e-learning industry is poised for a breakout $107 Billion 2015! And that's with a capital B. So, what's all that success spell for instructional designers?

I've never been more optimistic about the prospects for our profession. There are some interesting clues as to what all this success means for IDs currently in the field, and those exploring whether to jump into it. Consider the following statement by Mike Maples from Floodgate when speaking about the state of the industry:

“I think e-learning is still very compelling but very, very crowded. Companies involved with e-learning will struggle unless they have a truly disruptive idea and a structural advantage.”

— Mike Maples

Now I ask you, who better to drive said innovation and help subject matter experts develop that truly disruptive idea for how to teach something in a new way leveraging today's technological advances than instructional designers? 

Of note as well is that the article mentions many sites developing online learning for people to develop their own skills such as Lynda.com and General Assembly; the "consumer online learning space". Not much is mentioned about how many organizations are struggling to figure out how to turn this new world of online learning into a competitive advantage in how they develop their in-house talent. This "corporate online learning space" is a huge area of opportunity for IDs. 

There is so much innovation in this space that opportunities for instructional designers who continue to develop their skill sets will continue to abound. The online learning industry is far from a zero sum game, the pie is already large and growing. If you're not getting your share, you've really got no one else to blame but yourself.

What other opportunities for the online learning industry do you see that could lead to even greater growth rate than what was forecast in the Forbes piece? 

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Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop and train their employees and/ or customers. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

What do instructional designers have in common with professional translators?

I read this piece on Thomas Piketty's translator by David Gura, and was intrigued. And not just because c'mon, how many translators and their work break through the "mediasphere" and into our collective public discourse? Always reading with an eye towards what lessons I can learn from the piece, something caught my eye about how their work shares of quality with that of us instructional designers. While discussing how most translators are not very well-paid and describing their work, there is this gem:

...“capturing the flavor and the feeling and the context.”

You see we all-knowing preach how performance doesn't our current a vacuum, and neither should training- regardless of whether we're talking about instructor-led training or e-learning. In order for your learners to best practice the skills you are trying to teach, it helps to visualize and put those skills in the context in which they will need to perform them back on the job. This not only helps with retention, but with skills transfer.

Skill transfer refers to any tactics or strategies that you employee in your training to enable learners better recall of information learned well training- after said training has occurred. As it turns out, translators face similar challenges in capturing the flavor, feeling, and the context behind the words they are translating to a second language- at least the best ones do. 

How can you apply this principle of capturing the context to your e-learningHere's one way you can apply this. Many designers are concerned with a lot of elements of the user interface for the courses. Not just the navigation or what functionality to include in the course player, but what reusable screen design templates can they build to then speed up their course development. Rather than relying on abstract graphic designs or PowerPoint slide templates, ask your client or subject matter experts if they can supply you pictures of the environment where your target population typically performs. These images can be of workspaces your target audience would recognize. Then simply cover the image with a semi transparent color layer of your choice to match your course player template.

If you've got more than one of these images, you can actually create different slide templates based on these workspaces which hopefully your learners will recognize. Now your instruction will literally take place in the context of where it occurs in the physical world- in your online course. 

You can do this for practically any workspace, and its a cheap way to create a slide template. Here are a few examples for you to check out:

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- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

Another reason your best people are about to quit

After reading this article, I couldn't help but to think hey- they left one out!

You don't develop your people. Harvey S. Firestone said "the growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership." There are many competencies leaders should master, and developing those they lead is one rarely taught in business schools yet critical to your ability to retain top talent. More than giving your people a sense of where they can go in their careers which is mentioned in the article (see point #5), great leaders plan and assign learning opportunities that stretch the capabilities of their people. Leaders will ask their people where they would like to take their careers, and then actively seek training, e-learning programs, webinars, industry conferences, and other developmental opportunities for their people to grow. Show me a manager who doesn't allow time for their people to train and hone their skills, and I'll show you a demoralized team whose people will exit stage left at the first opportunity that comes along.

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

How closely should your e-learning simulate the performance of a skill?

Our advice to clients— within your budgetary and other constraints your e-learning should allow for skill performance and practice that very closely resembles the real-world environment.  No picture that I’ve come across recently exemplifies this principle more than that of Patrick below, the virtual patient used to train medical students entering the field of proctology. You can track Patrick’s very existence to this line in the article—

“Currently, students receive minimal practice and interaction in intimate exams due to the high cost for training and high anxiety nature of the exams.”

Feel free to read more about Patrick and the team that developed him by clicking here. When selecting a delivery medium for instruction, never forget e-learning is most effective when:

1.        Practicing the skills to be taught is too dangerous, risky or costly to allow for practice in the real world (think of the military’s use of flight simulators, or Patrick in the article above),

2.       Your learners are very geographically dispersed, or

3.       The skills you need to teach lend themselves to online delivery (i.e. software training).

Unfortunately, decisions are sometimes made at the beginning of the instructional design process with thinking that goes something like this, “because we have all these PowerPoint’s already built and e-learning development software is so inexpensive,” or “it has been decided this will be an e-learning project.” In many of these situations where the medium does not fit the learning situation, the results are often very unfortunate but irreversible after construction of the learning materials has begun.

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

5 Cost drivers of E-learning projects

One of the questions we hear almost daily from customers is―How much should I budget for the development of my custom e-learning project?  Our answer remains the same every time.  We're not trying to be elusive with how we price our services mind you, but honestly it simply depends.  Anyone who tells you otherwise, I’d sprint away in the direction!  So, it depends on what you may be asking yourself?  And hence, we decided to write this post.

There are five key cost drivers the building custom e-learning and they are:

1. Project Management

Building e-learning generally involves some moving parts, and at any given time you want to know how far along in your course development you are.  When working on a course or building out a large curriculum, you’ll also be involving a variety of players such as graphic designers, animators, writers, subject matter experts, voice over talent, video editors,  or other specialists.  In order for your project to stay on time and on budget, you’ll want to budget time for the development of a project plan as well as weekly update calls or meetings.  In our experience we have found these activities to consume roughly 5 to 10% of your budget. As the old adage goes fail to plan and you’re planning to fail.

2. Instructional Design

Many clients who approach us at some point during our conversation will say something to the effect of “we already have the content; we just need someone to put it online for us”.  Experience has taught us to reviewing the content before providing a quote. Often what is referred to as content is often a PowerPoint deck or Microsoft Word Outline of the bullet points used by a previous instructor-led initiative. This “content” was designed to jog a facilitator’s memory that was going to stand in front of a classroom and dive deeper into these points. Without the luxury of the content inside of the instructor’s brain, the bullet points are can rarely be repurposed. More than likely the content must be rewritten from the ground up (beginning with a quick needs analysis) to meet the needs of an audience that will be experiencing this training online, without the aid of a facilitator or instructor, and at their own pace. 

This is where an instructional designer adds value to your project. While e-learning authoring tools are indeed simple to use, designing and building an engaging and immersive experience for your learners requires a degree of creativity, writing ability, and most importantly knowledge of instructional strategies that many subject-matter experts lack.  In our experience, you’ll want to budget roughly 25% of your e-learning project budget on quality instructional design.

3. Multimedia Design and Development

After the instructional design is complete and appropriate instructional strategies selected for all of the objectives that you’re teaching, it’s time to develop any multimedia assets you may need. This includes any navigational elements, custom graphic design, and video or audio that needs to be recorded and edited for use in the course.  If you’ve got a limited budget for the development of multimedia assets you want to let your instructional designer know so that they can leverage the use of lower-cost methods such as stock photography and or even assets currently existing in the public domain in your course.  A general principle is the more customized you need your course to be, the more you will need to spend to build these assets from scratch.  Again, generally speaking we have found it safe to budget roughly 25% of your budget to the design and development of multimedia assets.  This varies greatly of course; it is much more inexpensive to record software demonstrations on your PC then it is to hire acting talent and a camera crew in order to stage live role-plays and scenarios in a studio.

4. Interactivity

Training involves practice.  The effectiveness of your e-learning course depends on how well you allow the learner to engage with your content and practice new skills and behaviors (as opposed to having someone sit there reading or listening to a narrated PowerPoint show).  This secret sauce is truly what sets e-learning a part from what we call e-listening― a lecture delivered by a PC as opposed to a talking head in front of a classroom.  Luckily, a quality instructional designer can bake interactivity right into a course with the right multimedia assets, so there is no additional human resource to throw in.  The expense comes in the authoring of the activities, and in their testing in whichever software platform you are using to build the e-learning.  While anyone can insert static images onto slides, it takes a little more time, knowledge of your tools’ capabilities, and creativity to engage your learners in an online environment.  We’ve found throughout our years of building e-learning programs that you can reasonably expect designing interactivity into a course to consume about 25% of your projected budget.

5. Subject-matter expert (SME) availability

Last but not least, it is important to remember that no e-learning is designed in a vacuum.  One often overlooked expense is the time it takes for your designer or developer to acquire the content from subject-matter experts in order to build e-learning.  Even in smaller projects where a subject-matter expert is leveraging an authoring tool to build a course without the benefit of a designer, you must budget for the time it takes to gather all of the content, even when it’s just screen recordings or screen captures; it will take time.  Once your e-learning course is in its 1st draft or in a very rough state, you’ll want to budget in time for a SME who is also a member of your target audience to go through it and provide you with feedback on how you can improve the training experience.  A very general assumption is to budget for 10 – 20% of your costs to SME time. 

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Though every project is different and we're not very big fans of generalizations, these cost estimates are born out of our experiences and yours may be different. 

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Quality of e-learning development is a subjective thing, and budgetary and other resource constraints may limit the instructional strategies you can employ.  Coupled with the fact that- as this image points out “there is always someone who will do it cheaper”.   If we left out a cost driver, or you’d like to share with us how your projects for different please do so in the comments section below. We'd love to hear from you!

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.