Rapid E-Learning:  A Revolution has Arrived

As many of you know, E-Learning has become a large and fast-growing market which drives more and more web development every day. As a web developer or instructional designer, you are often asked to build content which must inform, educate, and certify skills in a compelling and creative way. Now, thanks to tools like Articulate, Breeze, Interwise, Webex and more, a revolutionary new approach is available, which we call Rapid E-Learning.

Traditionally the process of building “courseware” or “e-learning content” has been a sequential effort including a team. The team typically includes a subject matter expert (SME), instructional designer (ID), a web developer, and a project manager. Together these four people design an instructional plan and follow a circular or “waterfall” process something like the following.

This process often has many checkpoints, review cycles, and testing cycles to make sure that the courseware is complete, instructionally sound, interesting, and working well.

Challenges with this Approach

This approach provides many benefits: it assures that your content is instructionally sound; it closely involves the SME to keep content current; it makes sure that your resulting course works correctly and tracks correctly with your learning management system; it makes sure that your content uses the graphic standards, language, and colors and fonts that fit into your corporate infrastructure.

The problem is that it is often too slow.

According to our research, the #1 challenge which e-learning developers face is
“It takes too long to develop a course.”

Time is often the enemy of a training program.  As time marches on, the business challenge continues to grow – and often the training problem itself will change.

For example, suppose your job is to build a sales certification program for a major new product release. You need to reach out to several thousand sales people and resellers quickly. But you also know that 6-9 months from now there will be an update release and probably new features and pricing. By the time you get your course published, will it be out of date? Also, the product managers (subject-matter-experts) are busy – how can I get enough of their time? I need them now.

This example is common in nearly every organization. Sometimes the problem is a product launch; other times it is a new regulation, a merger, or a major new corporate initiative. There are two aspects to the time challenge:

Time to Build:        Can I build the content fast enough to meet the business demand?
Shelf-Life:              Will the content be current and relevant long enough to justify the investment?

Technology Integration Adds Time and Complexity

In addition to the time required to develop courseware, there is the time to integrate, test, produce, and launch courseware. Most companies require integration of the courseware into their Learning Management System (LMS). This process alone often takes weeks and sometimes require specialized technology skills – even if the courseware is “AICC or SCORM” compliant. If the IT group is busy, this process may take 30 days or longer to complete.

(For more information on the technology integration issues, read our Enterprise Integration Whitepaper on this topic, available at: http://www.bersin.com/contactus/enterprise_integration.asp).

The Answer:    Enter Rapid E-Learning

A new solution has arrived, one which we call Rapid E-Learning.   Rapid E-Learning is a whole new category of content:   instructional content which can be built in days, using off-the-shelf, easy to use tools.  With Rapid E-Learning, SME’s can author content – using instructional templates, graphics, fonts, and images developed by a central training or web development group.

Unlike traditional e-learning, Rapid E-Learning programs can be developed so quickly that they can be considered “disposable.” If the business problem changes, you can afford to take them offline and redo them easily.

New Tools Fuel the Market

A variety of new tools and technologies are fueling this market.  Two examples are Articulate and Breeze.  Each of these tools builds on PowerPoint -- giving subject-matter-experts and instructional designers the ability to use existing content and add sound, assessments, and animations easily.  Someone familiar with PowerPoint can “publish to the web” in a few minutes without any training in web development.

Similar tools are available for application and software training.  RoboDemo, for example, uses a similar approach by letting developers capture actual screen shots and mouse movements to quickly build instructional content focused on PC and web applications. Instead of teaching someone “how-to” use a software application with RoboDemo the instructional designer can simply “show them” precisely what to do.

Both these tools follow a similar approach: give a subject-matter-expert access to a simple, easy-to-use tool which enables them to build content quickly. Content is published into Macromedia Flash® and can then be modified and extended by web developers when necessary.

Instructional designers and web developers still build templates, graphics, logos, and fonts which are shared among content publishers. Actual content development is done by subject-matter-experts ,not web-designers, freeing the bottleneck of the traditional development approach.

What is the role of the Instructional Designer?

The biggest criticism of this approach comes from the traditional instructional designer: “you mean we are going to let subject-matter-experts develop their own training content? They have no background in instructional design.  What if they just develop rapid “junk” which has no instructional impact?”

This is a fair criticism.  However in practice what we find is that instructional designers still play a critical role. In some organizations it is the ID who builds the templates, guidelines, and final edits to make sure that content is effective and consistent.  Subject-matter-experts need coaching and an outline to make sure that the content they build is easy-to-follow, jargon-free, and written in language easily understood by the audience.  These guidelines should come from an ID.

If you are an instructional designer, your role in this process is to build the templates, processes, and coaching tools that let SME’s build content quickly and effectively. Often your role will be to add assessments and publish content which is developed quickly by others. You can now leverage your skills and background across a larger number of programs and a larger audience of content developers.

When do you use Rapid E-Learning?

One of the critical questions to answer is “when do you use this approach?”  Does this replace more traditional approaches to e-learning?  We believe the answer is no.  Used appropriately, Rapid E-Learning solves a range of problems which are time-critical – but does not necessarily fit for every instructional challenge.

At Bersin & Associates we have developed a taxonomy we call “The Four Categories of Training.” We break all informational and skills problems into four types of solutions, as shown below.   For any given problem you can approach it in one of these four ways, depending on the specific business challenge and audience being addressed.

The Four Categories of Training -- © Bersin & Associates

In this example we show four ways of handling a price change in the new Cadillac. Depending on the audience you are trying to reach and the goals of your program, you can approach this problem in four different ways:

The important lesson here is that for any business problem you may use one or more of these approaches. Rapid E-Learning, then, will be used often – and may replace or simply supplement other approaches.

How does Rapid E-Learning Affect Our Organization?

This new approach will have a dramatic affect on your organization. If you are in a training function, you now have a new “bag of tricks” to use. You can start using the “four types” approach to segment your training into categories and apply rapid techniques to those problems which are time critical.

If you are a web developer, these new tools will enable you to offload more time-critical development tasks directly to SME’s and instructional designers. You can then add Flash animations and other more sophisticated interactivities to these programs without having to build basic instructional content.

If you are an ID, these techniques free you to think more broadly. You should be developing templates, processes for editing and publishing content, and creating a taxonomy and approach to decide when to use Rapid E-Learning and when to use blended or other approaches.