A Year in the Life of an E-Learning Project

Training & Development, Sept, 2000 by John Redmon, Jennifer J. Salopek

You can always get what you want.

The Client. Joan needs her e-learning project up and running in six months.

The Instructional Designer. Kelly needs to work with subject matter experts to develop storyboards.

The Project Manager. Alex works closely with Joan to determine budget constraints.

The Programmer. Greg needs functional requirements before he can start development.

The End User. Robert needs anytime, anywhere learning, and needs to be able to use the system with ease.

The Graphic Artist. Jackie needs to work with Kelly to make the learning content visually appealing, entertaining, and functional.

Everyone involved with an e-learning project, from the corporate training executive to the end user, has a unique set of requirements to determine success. By getting off to the right start, your e-learning project can be--well, not all things to all people--but almost.

Getting off to the right start involves working through these major steps:

* determining if and why you need e-learning

* getting buy-in--from management, team members, other departments, even suppliers

* conducting a well-planned proposal and bidding process (for the purposes of this article, were assuming you're working with an external vendor to design and develop your e-learning project).

If it ain't broke, don't fix it

Why should your organization move into e-learning? Well, maybe it shouldn't. Maybe your classroom training and CBT are working just fine.

To determine your organization's readiness for e-learning, you'll want to consider factors in two major areas: culture and technology.

Do a culture check. What are the long-range goals for your HRD program? If they include such objectives as synchronized communication, instant and continuous feedback, or facilitated performance reviews, e-learning may be for you.

For example, just-in-time learning or performance support might be a goal that's supported by your organization's culture. If the objective is to provide small chunks of readily available information, either as an electronic performance support tool or because the employee doesn't have time to complete an entire course, then just-in-time training through e-learning can be a valuable option.

Further, analyze your current delivery methods. Is your organization's unique brand of training as effective as e-learning? For example, a client from a South African bank was training tellers on appropriate behaviors during holdups. The effectiveness of that training depended on immediate shock value, high-quality video, and high-volume, realistic sound effects delivered through headphones. In that instance, it was determined that staying with CD-ROM delivery was more appropriate than Web-based e-learning.

Also, consider that your current classroom program can't last forever. Trainers change careers, retire, and move to other companies. Further, trainers tend to individualize the delivery of content. E-learning can often give your message more consistency than using multiple individuals to deliver it.

As you perform your organizational culture check, keep in mind that you can adopt a blended approach, in which e-learning can enhance and complement classroom training.

Analyze the benefits. Do you train multiple people at multiple locations on a single skill? Do you incur expenses for room rental, handouts, equipment, and travel? E-learning can help eliminate those expenses by allowing you to build the course once, then deliver it simultaneously to multiple locations--all at a fixed cost.

Keep updates in mind. The maintenance to update e-learning solutions can be considerably less expensive than updating classroom solutions. For example, how many instructor guides, student workbooks, overheads, and handouts have to be reprinted when policies change or content becomes outdated? Unless you have an in-house printing press, those costs can be steep.

In creating your e-learning project, build yearly updates into the budget. The costs associated with those updates are relatively minor: Change the information in the master course, and it's automatically changed for all learners, worldwide.

Do a technology check. Next, determine whether your organization has the technological infrastructure to support WBT. Minimum requirements vary, based on the types of media you want to present. As a general guideline, you must do two things: Make sure that your intended audience has an Internet connection, and find out what kind of computer platform they work on.

For example, if your average user dials into the Internet on a 56K modem and doesn't have a sound card or speakers, you're not going to be able to use audio or video to present critical information. Also keep in mind that e-learning requires a dedicated server to host the training course, and staff to maintain and update the content.

Get buy-in and support

Your next step is to identify or develop champions within the organization who will support your efforts to move into e-learning. For external training organizations or development teams working with external vendors, this phase is about coming to terms with what must be done and how it must be done. For internal training departments, this phase can be spent convincing management, team members, outside departments, and corporate executives that e-learning is appropriate.