A really worrying trend....
Ok, I was going to post about this a couple of weeks ago, but you know how sometimes you think "maybe I shouldn't say that?". Well after seeing David Wilson's post on The Changing Face Of Content Creation I just thought I had to say something. David's post is a good read, and I agree with what he says, but he missed out one worrying trend;
Amateurs with rapid production tools becoming elearning producers.
Like every industry, elearning has had it's share of dodgy practioners, quite often multimedia companies who saw the elearning boom as a chance to make a few extra quid. Their output was often visual rich, and let's be fair quite appealing, but often lacked sound instructional design. But now there's a bigger threat.
I've started to come across, and recently met, a number of people who are trainers of some sort or another and who have seen tools like Lectora and Articulate and decided to enter the elearning market. This is scarier than it first sounds. They currently provide face to face training services to companies, and they see those companies buying elearning content from established providers and suddenly think "hey I can do that".
Now what's wrong with that I hear you ask, a bit of competion in the market never did anyone any harm. Well trust me it may harm your learners. Which brings me to the bit I previously shyed away from posting about. Some recent, real experiences I had.
In the first, we were holding a tender meeting for a new piece of content and we saw four companies, three established elearning providers and one recent entry to the market whose experience was in face to face delivery. This new supplier was there at the insistence of the SME, who was adamant that they could do better than the others and for far less money.
We'd asked each supplier to come up with an idea of what the course may look like, and as you'd expect the established suppliers showed us a mocked up page with the look and feel and then an idea of how they would treat the topic; all very good. The new supplier enthusiastically ran through a rather ropey PowerPoint presentation, and then asked if there were any questions. The SME thanked them for the presentation, and asked them if they could show us what their proposed elearning solution would look like. The reply? "Er, that was the elearning".
The second thing happened to me on a recent instructional design course. Over coffee at the start of the day I was chatting to two guys who run an IT training consultancy. They told me that they ran a lot of face to face courses, but saw an opportunity to put their knowledge into elearning content which they could sell along side their current offer. No bad thing I thought, and they seemed to know their stuff when it came to Microsoft Applications and the like.
During the morning session we went through some established models of instructional design, partly to establisehd knowledge in the group and then to look at where they did and didn't fit with elearning. Who hasn't heard of Gagne was the first question, and probabaly 50% of the room put their hands up (which seems about right). Who hasn't heard of Blooms Taxonomy was the next question, and this time about 25% of the room put their hands up (fair enough I thought). Then we got on to something that really must be one of the first things that anyone learns about as a trainer. Who hasn't heard of Honey and Mumford's learning styles was the question, and this time the only two people to put their hands up where our two IT trainers.
Come the next coffee break I find myself back with these guys, this time enthusing about how much they'd learnt so far and how great that learning styles thing was. "We'd never thought about people learning in different ways" one of them said, "we just turn up and run the course". I'm not kidding, they really said that.
So.... they're not really even trainers, they're SME's. Personally I wouldn't let an internal SME loose with an elearning tool, so the thought of an external SME with no real grasp of learning design producing content for my learners just fills me with horror.
But that's okay you say, we're the L&D department we wouldn't let that happen to us. Oh yeah? We've had two situations like this ourselves recently, one we managed to stop the other we didn't. A new system was being introduced by a department that had it's own budget for training, and they bought and launched an appalling piece of content produced by the suppliers own "training team" (someone with a copy of Captivate and no common sense as far as I can make out).
Be careful out there.
Labels: rapid content creation
posted by Barry Sampson @ 8:54 PM
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9 Comments:
Ah, but Barry, who's learners are they? The businesses, L&D's or their own very personal self. Yes rapid e-learning is a big thing at the moment, and yes this will result in lots of really bad e-learning out there. I think we've seen enough evidence of this already in our corporate research. But the challenge maybe, is how to end up with lots of "not that bad" e-learning out there, rather than a little "quite OK" e-learning that we have currently.
As you know from your own experiences, the days of the e-learning perfectionist controlling "learning as usual" are dead and buried. The role of e-learning experts is to raise the basic bar for everyone, and occassionally to get the opportunity to really do it properly when the right project/budget/impact/need arises.
So let's accept that the cat is now firmly out of the bag. How can ensure that rapid e-learning can be done with some competence of learning outcome by the SMEs (and lots of L&D who as you point at don't understand instructional design and learning theory either!).
DAVID
Who's or whose??? Sorry for the dodgy English.
DAVID
Good challenge David. I would like to say that they are their own learners, but in the context of a corporate environment in which the business is paying for their learning in order that they are better able to perform their role, they are the business's learners and L&D as a function of that business has a responsibility to ensure that the learning materials are fit for purpose.
I don't think we disagree here. Even if we just raise the bar to the level of "not that bad" elearning, we should keep most of the cowboys out. But what about those organisations that have no "elearing experts"? There's a risk that they'll either reject it and think that all elearning is that poor, or possibly even worse, buy this content and then conclude that its poor learning outcomes are simply down to elearning not working.
I don't propose that we do anything to ensure that the SME's produce competent content. That should stay with L&D. SME's have had MS Word for years but we don't let them write classroom training do we?
"SME's have had MS Word for years but we don't let them write classroom training do we?" - no I guess not, they use PowerPoint instead!
Your comment also highlights a related issue - what do we consider training - my guess is the stuff that L&D worries about. After all, there's probably shed loads of SME-delivered powerpoint training sessions with colleagues that don't get called "training". Does this mean we would be happy for those to be crap e-learning, but the ones the training function worries about?
But, yes, I'm sure we do agree.
:)
David
David/Barry,
Clearly there is more activity and interest in developing custom-designed learning resources within organisations of all sizes. As a long-time designer and developer of e-learning, I'm pondering a number of questions that this raises:
Is this another rotation of the insource/outsource cycle that has been running over the past 15-20 years?
Given that the quality of basic documentation, presentations, web pages is highly variable, will having "easy to use" authoring tools improve or make worse the quality of communication/learning that actually occurs?
Will there be a shift of understanding within those who buy and consume e-learning content, that the value is not in the nuts and bolts of putting it together (which was hard and is now much easier), and instead is in the creative quality of the writing and visual design which is independent of the media deployed?
How will internal production teams acquire the skill and experience to manage the development process efficiently so that real cost benefits are achieved?
Finally, shouldn't L & D professionals be primarily focusing on the effectiveness of the learning process and communities within their organisations?
I'd be interested in your answers.
For me this raises another interesting question. "Is bad training worse than no training?" I can see certain corporate situations where contraints limit learners to "bad" training created by the SME with an elearning tool or no training at all.
Just because they can build content doesn't mean they should but sometimes it could be better than nothing...and of course sometimes it could be worse.
I'm curious to see what others' take on that is.
Lars, you pose some interesting questions.
Will access to easier to use tools make things better or worse? - I honestly doubt they'll make much difference in that respect. As has been said in many other places, there is and always has been good and bad learning, technology based and otherwise. We just have another set of tools to deliver it.
I think some organisations are having that realisation that it's about the learning and not the tools. Unfortunately there are still many others who don't.
All other considerations aside, the cost benefit argument is an interesting one and we've had this debate a few times internally. My take on it is that myself and my colleagues are already employed and paid to produce learning materials, we're just gaining another method to do so. But we are talking about using rapid tools to create solutions that wouldn't have been 'e' otherwise. Anything we would previously have outsourced, we still would.
As to whether L&D professionals should be primarily focussed on the effectiveness of the learning process etc. - Well yes of course, and that includes elearning. In fact I think it particularly relates to elearning.
Great question Mike. I think I would have to say that bad training is worse than no training. Not so much because of the possibly immediate damage, but because long term it just serves to undermine people's belief in learning.
Barry, great comment.
You're spot on when you say that most people in the training industry don't know enough about basic learning theory and practice.
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