We’re getting used to instant search, instant news, instant messages, instant updates, instant food, instant banking, and instant everything. In this world of instant gratification sometimes we need to take a moment and think is everything really necessary ‘now’?  Aren’t there things that need more time to be created properly, created beautifully?  While elearning itself helps the instant gratification needs of learners by being available whenever and wherever, elearning development needs little more time to be created well and can’t really be instant.

Every now and then we have prospects /clients wanting us to take up projects with unreasonably difficult deadlines maybe because they have internal or external commitments to meet, or just that their CEO has asked it to be ready on a particular date. We’re asked to comply or else they’d look for another vendor.  I’ll admit, we do comply with such requirements at times to keep clients within our fold. More often than not, we try and convince our clients that rushing through design and development isn’t a good option for either of us. Eventually a rushed project leads to additional costs, lower quality, missed deadlines, and lots of heartburn. Sometimes the unreasonable deadlines could be a result of delays from clients; yet they don’t want the delays to affect the final; this makes every milestone along the way more difficult to meet. Our regular clients understand this very well (having been there done that) and don’t unreasonably rush a bespoke development project.

‘Haste makes waste’ is a proverb we are taught and surely we know it to be true from our own experience.  Still, that’s one thing some clients are not willing to accept when it comes to custom elearning development.  Here ‘haste’ is not to be confused with ‘Rapid eLearning’ which has its own place in custom elearning development and it works very well in certain situation, for certain programs. We ourselves do a fair bit of Rapid Authoring projects but with reasonable timeframes for delivery.

Earlier I shared 5 keys to make eLearning outsourcing work where one of point is to Follow Process. Usually while accepting a difficult deadline, the vendor is squeezing or doing away with some steps of the process which hurts the projects objectives later. Also it is very important to note the elearning development is an iterative process. The iterative aspect, if built into the process itself, will help you get better elearning output. If you wish to create effective elearning do not push for unreasonably difficult deadlines. Remember haste indeed makes waste when it comes to custom elearning development.

The post eLearning Development: Haste Makes Waste first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Here’s a video – produced for ASTD TK’11 – that summarizes Upside Learning in 60 seconds. I thought it will be good to share will our readers as well. Hope you like it!

The post Upside Learning In 60 Seconds! first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

If you have been involved with custom eLearning development you have either asked these questions yourself or have been asked these by a client. The concept of ‘levels’ of custom eLearning development is a commonly used standard matrix for comparing vendors; sadly, this is a much abused concept too.. Every vendor (and client) has a unique definition of levels and they seldom match.

Last month The Chapman Alliance published the results of their study about the efforts taken for development of various levels of custom eLearning. A summary is presented below.

In my opinion, these levels are more about multimedia development rather than the learning design/strategy. They are in no way linked to the learning value of the program.  Multimedia development is a secondary aspect of learning strategy, not the strategy itself. But the difference between the two sometimes gets blurred, especially since levels have a direct impact on the development cost.

A Fresh Perspective

I think we can divide the different types of eLearning courses based on two parameters – Type and Level. The Type corresponds to the level of bloom’s taxonomy that the course is targeting. Each Type further having multimedia development at 3 possible levels. So one can have 9 type of possible courses namely CT1-MM1, CT3-MM2 etc.

In terms of cost of development these may stack up something like this:

In terms of costs this would present a similar picture as that shown in The Chapman Alliance survey. However, this presents what I believe is a more correct way to select an appropriate solution.

First select a Type of solution that suits the performance outcomes and learning objectives, and then impose cost constraints on it.  To simplify the implication –choose one of the lines on the graph and settle at the multimedia level your development budgets allow.

The post A Fresh Look At Levels of Custom eLearning Solutions first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

The study categorizes custom elearning into 3 levels as below:

They had asked about the time it takes to develop content at each of these levels.
Here are the results:

These two slides suggest the per hour resource rate is greater than $100.

That sounds fairly high and it seems like many of the organizations participating in this study are not outsourcing their custom elearning development work. I do believe there is room for them to explore a cost saving of 25-50%

Another interesting slide is the most frequently used components in a blended solution. Clearly classroom, virtual classroom, self paced elearning make up the bulk of the blend.

Source Citation:  Chapman, B. (2010). How Long Does it Take to Create Learning? [Research Study]. Published by Chapman Alliance LLC. www.chapmanalliance.com

The post Custom eLearning Development Costs – Results From Chapman Alliance Study first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

The Tuts+ (pronounced tutsplus) education network which has tons of “How To” tutorials is now focusing on “Why” tutorials as well. They plan to put up two week ‘Sessions’ on various creative subjects like interface design, illustrative typography and creative freelancing, etc. Each session is a block of articles, interviews, tutorials and content on a particular creative subject. A session will have these posted every day. The first session is about creative character illustration and they have already (it’s just day 4 of the session today) shared a lot of useful information there.

I think this is a great resource for all Graphic Designers working in Custom eLearning Development who often need to create scenario based content for different domains like management, sales, production, etc. Well designed and appropriate characters certainly help in creating more effective and engaging scenarios. Using these tutorials, even instructional designers can understand what goes into creating a good character and how they could influence a graphic designer when getting characters for their scenarios designed and illustrated.

The post Do You Know The Why Of Design first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.