e-learning community
A rare breed Why developing is not for everyone Clive Shepherd I
’m an incurable optimist, but it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that a wide range of the development tasks associated with learning technologies – including the use of authoring tools, plus the post-production of graphics, animations, audio and video – are not going to be for everyone. Why? Because all these activities require you to be incredibly systematic and, above all, organised. There is probably a minority of people working within learning and development which simply don’t have what’s required to develop these qualities; a more significant proportion simply have no inclination. If you work from home, as I do, and you don’t
allow anyone else on your computer, then you stand a reasonable chance of getting yourself adequately organised. You’ll be able to find things; you’ll back up. If you work in a large organisation, it all becomes so much more difficult. You may have a reasonable system of shared drives, but most likely this will be completely chaotic. If you look after your own files, then – let’s face it – these could be anywhere. If you set out to be an accountant or a software
Even the simplest authoring tasks require a lot of organisation
engineer, the chances are you’ll not only put in the effort to keep everything in order, but you’ll actually enjoy it. Unfortunately, most people do not enter the L&D profession with the same predilictions.
Version control
Even the simplest authoring tasks require a lot of organisation. Perhaps you develop your work in PowerPoint, which at least does have the advantage of bringing it all together in a single file. But then quite probably there’s also a host of source files – photos, logos, charts, screen grabs, not to mention videos and audio files – that you’ve gathered along the way. And you may have each of these in multiple formats – the huge file that you downloaded from your camera; the smaller, cropped and corrected one; and another which was adjusted to fit in with your colour scheme. Then there are all the different versions you may have had to produce along the way in response to changing needs and feedback from a gazillion stakeholders. Did you store all these separately, all clearly numbered? I thought not. And don’t forget all the output files, the Flash, the
HTML, the SCORM wrappers, again in numerous versions. Oh, and I forgot language versions.We could be talking hundreds, perhaps even thousands of files. This is getting seriously geeky.
Cloud is a way out I’m assuming that you use desktop tools – applications that sit on your own computer – to carry out all your authoring tasks. Perhaps Captivate, Articulate, Camtasia or Lectora for authoring, not to mention PowerPoint and editors for different types of media. But there is a slow but gradual move to the use of online tools, which allow you to develop in the cloud. There is absolutely no doubt that, by using online tools, you will have far fewer difficulties getting organised. These systems probably allow you to tag all your media assets with clear, descriptive labels, and will store your different releases and language versions in some systematic fashion. Most importantly, you will not be developing in
isolation – you’ll be able to share and collaborate with others in your team. In the meantime, if you’re one of those who never keeps notes, has an inbox containing the last five years’ emails, and tries to keep your diary in your head, then here’s some advice – when they’re looking for volunteers for authoring duty, make sure you take a pace backwards.
Clive Shepherd is an independent e-learning consultant and chair of eLearning Network
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