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.

Instructional Design requires time

I think I'll add this piece to the list of required reading for prospective clients.  And yes, I purposely used the word "required". I already harp on this whenever we propose X number of design hours on a project, and almost reflexively the first thing a client wants to take a scalpel to is the design time. Anyone else have this experience?

If you want the cliff notes, the needs of the students at San Jose State were tossed on the back burner in favor of the wants of the business of education and of a company- Udacity.  

After reading about the school's experiment, one quote stood out in my mind- "The courses were also put together in a rush." I hope for the sake of the students that the University makes the most out of their pause in this relationship, and take a long hard look at their business decisions as well as some of their instructional design choices in this matter. 

The fact that the Udacity students fared significantly worse than their in-class peers is a red flag of sloppy and/ or rushed instructional design.  Indeed digging deeper into the piece you'll find the following gems- "faculty were building the courses on the fly... faculty did not have a lot of time to watch how students were doing in the courses because the faculty were busy trying to finish them." 

In other words, a rush job without much formative evaluation of the course before a final rollout.  I recall back when I was learning to design instruction there being great attention paid to conducting a formative evaluation of a course at every stage of development.  This step is crucial especially after instructional media, online interactions, and the instructional strategy are baked into a draft course. For online courses, you sit a sample of likely members of your target audience in front of a course and evaluate everything from their ability to navigate the course to how well they are able to perform the desired skills after completing the draft course.  The whole purpose of the exercise is to test the effectiveness of the instructional strategy and of the course and any associated materials.  

For the development of all of Collabor8's clients, we request a few test participants to go through our courses and provide us with invaluable feedback  using a punch list.  Many times, we create a simple spreadsheet in Google Drive, and share it with the folks who will be performing the testing.  It doesn't really need to be complicated, in fact- click here to see the format that we use.

Using this sheet, students can go in and provide us with feedback.  We ourselves use the sheet to note any observations that we find to be useful edits when doing our own internal quality reviews.  

To avoid a fiasco like this, keep your learner's interests and needs above all else.  And do yourself and your clients a favor, don't skip conducting a formative evaluation of your courses.  Also remember that online training courses are fantastic supplements to more traditional instructor-led training sessions. Investing a little time during development to evaluate might have alerted some in administration to the fact that some of the enrolled students in the online courses did not have reliable access to computers.

Additional source: Online Education Start-Up Gets 'F' From University

- 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.

Is it time to Reboot eLearning, or simply boot poor clients?

Read this article upon waking up today, and I'm not so sure our industry needs a reboot.  As instructional designers at heart, we work closely with our clients to educate them on the potential uses for their content in an online environment.  I've had that conversation dozens of times, where using the sleight of hand techniques we learned back from Performance Consulting we shift the conversation away from all of the facts our client wants his/ her learners to "learn" (more like "memorize" or "keep in mind" while performing) to the outcomes of desired performance.  You know the one.  It typically starts out with, "we have these PowerPoint files".  The author, Carol Leaman, does recognize this when she states-

"...especially businesses implementing eLearning all need to ask, not “what are we doing?” or even “why we're doing this?” but “how are we doing it?”

However, just two sentences below she falls into an all too familiar trap of asking "How do you deliver specifically what an employee needs to know..." -completely the wrong question.  Many of us in the field continue to hammer the point that what an employee needs to know should be the last thing you ask.  First and foremost, we should be asking-

1. What is the business goal?

2. What behaviors must learners perform to help us meet our business goal?

3. Why aren't learners performing this way?

4. What learning activities can we design that fall within the client's budget that will allow learners to practice these behaviors in an online environment, and receive feedback on their performance?

5. And lastly, the author's question- How do you deliver specifically what an employee needs to know?

In summary, I know I'm not alone in having these conversations with our prospective clients.  I speak to other designers on a daily basis, many outside of our sphere of influence, and some in other countries as well.  I had one know-it-all former attorney tell me that "lawyers learn via bullet points".  The challenge I see is not to completely reboot our industry because of prospects or clients that are relics from a previous era, but to boot prospects who insist on merely putting content online. 

Reminds me of the old proverb- you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.  I say boot these poor prospects, and work with those that will allow you to make a lasting difference and add value to their efforts.  Just like dating, you should have standards and choose clients wisely.  

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, You'll know when you find it."

-Steve Jobs

Let's talk about e-learning

- 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.