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Content on-the-fly
Why e-learning should be in perpetual beta Clive Shepherd W
hen you run a workshop for the first time it can be a bit nerve-wracking. After all, you’ve never tested your ideas
for content and activities against a real audience before. You can only guess at how long any session will actually take to complete. You don’t know for certain whether your design will work in meeting the underlying learning need. So, you cross your fingers and toes and give your ideas their first airing. Inevitably, some things will have worked well and some less so. You probably got many things right but you had to make all sorts of on-the-fly adjustments to cope with over-runs and mismatches between what the demand was from your audience and what you had chosen to supply. This is normal and not a cause for alarm. You set about designing version 2. This will work better but still not well enough. You keep on adjusting the design every time until eventually it flows well and achieves consistently good results. Not that you stop there because you will continue to have new ideas for improvements and the goalposts will keep on moving as the needs change. Yes, workshops are in perpetual beta. Contrast that with typical self-study e-learning. The design and development of this content is seen like the build up to a product launch, not the unveiling of a new service. Project teams are established to get all the work done and a process put in place to ‘ensure’ a right first time approach. Why ‘right first time’? Because the project team will be disbanded straight after launch and its members will disperse. It simply has to be perfect out of the box. But it won’t be, for the reasons we established in my workshop example. Even if it is spot on the target at launch, it won’t be soon after as bit by bit the content becomes less relevant for the audience and the need.
I once asked the CEO of a major e-learning company how much of their work was maintenance e.learning age september 2014
In an era in which software apps and web content are updated almost constantly and usually painlessly, there is simply no argument for treating e-learning content as if we were making $100m movies or printing books
of existing content, thinking that this would be a substantial revenue earner. I was surprised to find that hardly anyone maintains their content. They just wait four or five years for the content to become obsolete, then they start all over again. A right first time approach works if you are building skyscrapers or making Hollywood movies. The safety considerations or the cost of re-work simply demand it. And if you are sending out physical product, like printed books, it is clearly uneconomic to keep printing and distributing new versions. But in an era in which software apps and web content are updated almost constantly and usually painlessly, there is simply no argument for treating e-learning content as if we were making $100m movies or printing books.
Agile development of learning content is a process of successive approximation – getting closer and closer to what is right for the user. It means that you launch with content that is technically correct
and bug-free but simple and without all the bells and whistles. You then maintain a dialogue with your customers and make little enhancements as and when ideas and suggestions emerge. Perhaps a difficult concept requires further examples. Maybe more opportunities are needed for practising a skill. Could be that an animation would be helpful to illustrate a process. No problem, you can keep on making improvements just as long as the learning remains relevant. It doesn’t help that most e-learning content is exported from an authoring tool as a zip file and then uploaded to an LMS. This is a clunky way to deliver content. It is how websites used to work 10 years ago, before the advent of content management systems. We really should be assembling and delivering e-learning content on-the-fly, just like modern websites. That way we could build in some intelligence and personalisation – again just like the best apps and websites.
Until the guys who make the tools get their act
together, we can still operate a more agile design and development process. Ok, so we do have to do all that exporting and uploading from one tool to another, but that’s worth it if we want content that responds to user demands and continues to be relevant. Perpetual beta does not mean offering a product that is not yet fit for consumption. It means that we are always working to offer the best product we can.
Clive Shepherd is an e-learning consultant
@cliveshepherd 7
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