Four steps to building e-learning success: your timeline is tight and your budget even tighter. Here's a plan for researching, testing, and launching an e-learning program under strict time and money constraints

Workforce, May, 2002 by Jason Lewis, Dan Michaluk

Eliminate any courses that fail to meet your learning objectives or that are not appropriate for your audience/organization. For example, your sophisticated e-learners may laugh at the reconstituted MS PowerPoint presentations in one course. Or maybe the content of another relies on too much jargon. Sometimes course content will conflict with important organizational practice.

Your list of course candidates will slowly shrink to a manageable size. And if you've chosen vendors with broad enough course offerings, you'll still cover all or most of your learning objectives. This part of the process is more subjective. Therefore, it's important to keep careful notes to defend your choices.

Before deciding on a final list of course candidates, perform a quick test with stakeholders and end users. Show your sponsor and other key stakeholders one or more representative courses to help set expectations and gather feedback before it's too late to make adjustments to your recommendation.

Also, organize a field test for one typical course from each vendor. Field tests allow you to watch a typical user go through the whole process of acquiring and completing an online course. Carefully watch and take notes on how end users interact with the technology and the content. Pay equal attention to what they do and what they say about the experience. The results of these observation sessions will prevent bad course choices and enable you to write helpful user instructions.

When you're comfortable with the outcome of your tests, you're ready to settle on a final portfolio. In this last round of elimination, compare courses head to head and remove any inferior courses with learning objectives that are satisfied by stronger courses.

Ideally, you'll be able to reduce your implementation costs by removing one or more vendors that are faring poorly while still covering your learning objectives. (Don't select a vendor with only one or two suitable courses unless the courses are exceptional.) This last step is the most subjective part of your process. If you have an evaluation team, you'll have to work closely and refer often to your written notes. After several hours of discussion, you'll have a small group of courses that meet your learning objectives from a small number of vendors.

Step 4: Package and implement

The greatest portfolio in the world will flop without a solid implementation plan. Although the focus of this article is on selection, we would be remiss not to identify the four important issues you will face in preparing for rollout:

* How will you present the portfolio? In a printed booklet? In a page on your corporate intranet?

* How will you prepare people for e-learning, and how will you make the case for signing up and completing courses?

* What instructions will you provide to help people access and use the courses? What special instructions will you give to enable them to learn effectively? (You'll have to refer back to your evaluation notes to identify where special instruction is required.)