Creating Better e-Learning Faster Using Form-based Instructional Templates
In an effort to meet the growing demand for e-Learning course consumption, e-Learning designers and developers have often turned to PowerPoint conversion methods to try to scale e-Learning course production. However, because converted PowerPoints are not generally accepted as effective learning experiences, this has led to the prevailing belief that there is an inescapable tradeoff between quality and quantity.
In other words, if you want to build a course quickly, this belief suggests that it can’t be as instructionally effective as a course that takes longer to build.
This white paper discusses how new web-based technologies allow you to break this trade-off. With form-based instructional templates, e-Learning developers and instructional designers can create effective learning experiences much faster than ever before.
Why is Rapid e-Learning Development So Important?
While instructional designers have been pushing for effective course creation for years, business drivers have often constrained the quality. Using traditional web-design tools such as Adobe Flash and Dreamweaver has often resulted in extended timelines and enormous costs.
To understand how these changes have affected the industry, we need to consider the adoption of e-Learning as a concept—as a potential solution to solving human performance gaps.
E-Learning Moves from Innovation to Infrastructure
In 2000, course development was a time-consuming and costly proposition. It was also around this time that e-Learning was put forward by theorists and practitioners as the “silver bullet.” Forward-thinking companies typically hired outside vendors for their instructional design and web development expertise. Early adopters spent millions to take advantages of anytime, anyone, anywhere training.
The Magic Bullet
When describing the phases of technology evolution and adoption, Clark Aldrich calls this phase the “Magic Bullet” (Learning by Doing, Pfeiffer, 2006):
Vendors and consultants, lured by open purse strings, stoke the assignment, widely advertising the vision (rather than the reality) of what can be done.
| Traditional Costs |
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A typical metric tossed around as if it were scientific truth was “$30,000 - $50,000 per finished course hour.” Leaving the vagueness of this kind of metric aside (i.e. the actual length of a “course hour” was hotly debated); this means that five hours of training cost $150,000-$250,000 to produce. Even at this cost, the e-Learning often provided some great returns on investment over instructor-led training—if the training was well designed. Quality e-Learning of this type gave those purchasing this kind of service a significant advantage. |
Traditional e-Learning Projects
Cost Too Much |
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| Traditional Time Requirements |
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A typical course of this size, at that time, would have taken somewhere between 4-6 months to produce. So, while some early gains were made, this was not a scalable solution. Large organizations have hundreds and sometimes thousands of courses that need to be created, so this kind of spending and resource time requirements was allocated only for those courses that could merit the ROI required. |
Traditional e-Learning Projects
Took Too Long |
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Complicated Technologies Made e-Learning Development a Confusing and Limited Activity
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Not only did costs and time required make e-Learning difficult to adopt wholesale, but the technologies being used to create e-Learning were too difficult to learn. During this time, Rapid Intake published four books on how to use Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash to create e-Learning courseware. One of Rapid Intake’s goals at the time was to empower organizations to create e-Learning themselves. They traveled the country coaching and training on these tools. |
Development Technologies
Were Too Hard to Learn |
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Flash and Dreamweaver are great tools. However, the average person can expect to take six months to two years to become truly proficient—many people never have the time to become proficient at all.
Consequently, e-Learning development was limited to those who became experts at the technologies. Vendors often held customers “hostage,” requiring the customer to return again and again to the vendor for updates and maintenance, simply because the expertise in the technology used to create the courses in the first place was not had internally.
An analogy here might be helpful. When the very first word processors came out in the ‘70s and ‘80s (before the widespread adoption of personal computers), there were specialists who could provide an advantage to anyone who was willing to pay for their services. It’s easy to see in hindsight why outsourcing word processing was not a scalable solution. Custom one-off course development is not either.
| Cloning the SME |
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Duplication of effort was also a problem. Instructional Designers would have to “re-learn” what the subject matter expert (SME) already knew in order to deliver effective instruction online.
The challenge with this approach is that the cloning often doesn’t come off exactly as expected. This means that the instructional designer has to go back to the SME over and over for content reviews. |
Instructional Designers Had To
Become the SME |
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State of Confusion
Because it wasn’t scalable, e-Learning as a silver bullet soon came into question—it just cost too much, took too long to produce, and was too inefficient. In addition, course content was sometimes outdated as soon as it was released.
Aldrich describes this phase in technology evolution and adoption:
At some point, after the initial excitement, finding new successes becomes quite difficult. Even some of the early examples of success no longer seem quite so successful. (Learning by Doing, Pfeiffer, 2006)
Another Silver Bullet?
The question became, how do you shorten the time required, reduce the costs, and keep from having to clone the SMEs in the form of instructional designers?
The Advent of the PowerPoint Conversion Movement
Some vendors soon began touting PowerPoint conversion as the way to bridge these gaps. Imagine, if everyone has PowerPoint, then the SMEs themselves can create the content—just convert it to Flash, put it online, and everyone can create e-Learning. It sounds great in theory.
Aldrich’s statement about what happens after the confusion stage applies here:
The technology should just die, but then something happens. … Groups from all over recommit… They sacrifice some of the artistic and philosophical purity, even some of the quality… (Learning by Doing, Pfeiffer, 2006)
Instructional designers cringed (and continue to be dismayed) as everyone seemed to jump onto the bandwagon of PowerPoint conversion. Many shouted in one form or another:
“Putting a PowerPoint online doesn’t mean it’s e-Learning! It’s just a boring PowerPoint presentation online!”
Still, adoption of this method increased in speed because PowerPoint conversions sacrifice quality on the altars of business drivers. The big lesson is: business drivers win. It cost less and took less time.
Moreover, those training managers who were tasked with “getting an e-Learning program going” were able to say they had done it—and it even looked good. Why ask questions about effectiveness now?
| Problems with the PowerPoint Solution |
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While PowerPoint conversions help solve some problems, many are experiencing problems now that the initial excitement about PowerPoint conversion has died down:
* PowerPoint conversion really isn’t effective instruction—“Telling ain’t training” (attributed to Dr. M. David Merrill)
* PowerPoint isn’t interactive and learners find it boring and often tune out
* SMEs really have a hard time creating effective training when left to themselves
* Maintaining courses created in PowerPoint often requires re-recording or re-converting the original, which requires tedious updates |
Putting a PowerPoint Online
Only Makes it More
Accessible, Not More Effective |
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The Quality vs. Quantity Tradeoff
As PowerPoint conversion adoption becomes more widespread, the quality versus quantity tradeoff seems apparent: you either convert a PowerPoint and save on time and money but sacrifice quality, or you spend the time and money to create something effective.
Breaking the Quality vs. Quantity Tradeoff
Solutions like Rapid Intake’s questions the assumption that effective e-Learning content has to take a long time to create. It also questions the assumption that it has to cost a lot to produce.
These rapid e-Learning development platforms were designed to break the tradeoff by housing instructionally effective interactions in form-based templates. Using this break-through technology, anyone can build quizzes, tests, learning games, and simulations by filling out forms.
Because most content in these e-Learning development platform are form-based, anyone can quickly learn how to create interactive e-Learning that goes way beyond “telling as training.” It’s really the best of both worlds—it’s rapid and effective content that can be created quickly. The solution lies in instructional patterns.
What is an Instructional Pattern?
To understand the implication and potential of instructional patterns, let’s look at another discipline that already uses patterns heavily. Software programmers have been using code patterns for years. The idea is something like this: if you need to make the software do something (such as sort from A to Z as a simple example), the assumption is that since someone else has already run into this problem, there must already be a proven solution for addressing it. So, instead of figuring out the algorithm themselves, a programmer can turn to any number of resources to find out how to address that problem. Instructional patterns are similar—apply a proven method to a similar problem instead of reinventing the wheel.
An Example of Quickly Building a Simulation Based on a Pattern
While we could talk about quizzes, knowledge checks, learning interactions, tests, and e-Learning games, perhaps the best example is in the soft skill simulation.
Soft skills (meaning those skills that require critical thinking) are difficult, if not almost impossible, to train without human intervention. However, over the years, a common pattern for teaching at least one level of critical thinking, is to use a branching simulation.
In a branching soft skill simulation, the learner is presented with a problem (usually accompanied by a picture or a video to help insert emotion into and illustrate the problem). The learner is then presented with choices. Based on the learner’s choices, the scenario branches down one path or another, revealing the impact the learner’s choice had on the problem.
Good soft skill simulations include elements like:
* Well thought-out scenarios that aren’t too easy to figure out
* Multiple distracters that cause the learner to make difficult choices
* Scenarios that represent the real world
* Support for text, audio, images, and/or video
* Branching that affords several different outcomes
* General feedback (in the form of some kind of progress meter) as the learner progresses through the scenario
* Feedback from the scenario designer or SME at the end that helps learners learn from their mistakes
These kinds of simulations emerged as an accepted pattern for at least the first level of training on critical thinking skills. E-Learning vendors have been building these kinds of simulations for years, but usually from scratch.
Normally building these kinds of simulations could take weeks or months. First, it takes some time to design the simulation. However, it used to take even longer to build the simulation.
Now, with tools like the Unison™ Web-based Rapid e-Learning Development Solution, built on the Rapid Intake platform, anyone can create this kind of simulation in hours instead of weeks or months.
Because it uses an established instructional pattern, Rapid Intake “templatized” the approach and made it reusable to anyone using tools built on the Rapid Intake collaborative e-Learning development platform.
In Summary
Building interactive courses using form-based interactions built on instructional patterns increases the instructional effectiveness while simultaneously bringing dramatic cost and time savings.
About the Author
Garin Hess is the CEO of Rapid Intake, the leader in collaborative e-Learning development and review. The Rapid Intake Platform helps organizations learn faster by opening the rapid e-Learning development and review process to everyone. Hundreds of companies create, test, and deploy more interactive courses in less time with Rapid Intake technology.
Garin founded Rapid Intake in 2000. He has been managing, designing and developing interactive e-Learning solutions for over nine years. Before starting Rapid Intake, he worked as an instructional designer and training manager for two software companies. He has worked as instructional designer, developer, technical lead, and project manager on projects that have produced solutions for a variety of organizations, including large-scale implementations. He is the co-author of four e-Learning development titles that teach others how to create e-Learning courses. He has also been an Adjunct Professor in the Instructional Technology program at Brigham Young University (Hawaii). |
