This afternoon at the Guild, Paul Clothier chaired a panel on The Future of Rapid eLearning Tools. Panelists were Silke Fleischer (Adobe), Gabe Anderson (Articulate), Andrew Branch (Qarbon), and yours truly. Rapid eLearning (the rapidity is development time, not learning time) has not been on my radar; I approached the topic with beginner’s mind.
How did this approach come about? I trace the genesis back to the late nineties. A training manager who wasn’t going to develop content around a topic from a meeting would make the PowerPoint deck available. Ninety percent of the ones I saw had neither sound nor notes. I learn about as much from looking at someone else’s silent PowerPoint presentation as I do from looking at inkblots, yet training directors included this crap in their listings of courses and workshops to bulk up the appearance of what they had to offer.
When is it appropriate to use rapid eLearning development tools? For procedural, how-topics. For things you have to get out the door right away. And I see e-information applications in addition to eLearning. “Information is not instruction,” but sometimes information is all you need.
While no one came out and said it, rapid eLearning can cut the instructional designer out of the process. One member of the audience cautioned against letting the rapid tools fall into the wrong hands. Another said it would be disastrous if content were developed outside of the watchful eye of an instructional designer. It wouldn’t be “real training.” You betcha.
Think back to Henry Jenkins’ presentation this morning. We are going to be learning from one another. In communities. Peer learning. Why deny people tools for formatting and consistency? Clive Shepherd pointed out that this would be a marketing bonanza for the vendors. Get everyone creating content. Millions upon millions of potential customers….
My major ah-ha’s were that Articulate, Adobe Contribute, and Qarbon can play a major role in sharing knowledge and democratizing content. My wish list would include easy assignment of tags. I’d also like to see a content rating system that kicks in automatically. As Wayne Hodgins has said, there’s no excuse not to associate a rating with every scrap of digital content. Another person wanted to be able to pluck (or add) one slide at a time from an existing presentation.
People were concerned about keeping track of swarms of small rapid eLearning chunks. Chris Willis brought up the good old days of Authorware, when everything was right there in one package. Unfortunately, those monoliths were difficult to update and required skilled programmers/designers.
My picture of the future mimics the loose coupling of the web. “Small pieces, loosely bound.” Today’s rapid eLearning tools may evolve into the platform where the small pieces are made.
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I enjoyed your provocative style and insightful commentary at “The Future of Rapid eLearning Tools” panel. Yes, the end product of Articulate, Adobe and Qarbon’s rapid authoring products is only as good as it’s author and much is being done by knowledge leaders rather than instructional designers. But what these products have done is to democratize online teaching and put multimedia teaching tools into so many more hands. The net effect, I believe, has been very good for learning in general, even considering all of the “bad” programming that has been produced. My company PRESENT e-learning Systems, has produced standardized educational materials for a generation of medical residents where before they had only one on one teaching. In effect, we brought the best teachers at each program to all the programs. Now, even small programs in remote sites get taught by the teachers from Mass General, etc. We could only have done this quickly and economically if the teachers did not have to be flown to central locations, put into studios and asked to record their lectures. Articulate’s authoring tool is simple enough to use that it allowed these non-techies to create some great programming. We sent them a digital microphone, did a little phone support and got some great lectures recorded. And in doing so, standardized the teaching at program across the country. Create a great tool and there is no telling what use people will find for it…
In addition to “When is it appropriate to use rapid eLearning development tools?”, I’d add, ‘For whom is it appropriate to use rapid eLearning tools. I don’t think it’s appropriate for novices, but for practitioners and experts (continuum from novice, through practitioner, to expert) it can make sense. Again, not when they need a major skill set change, but when they need an update, or new information.
Yes, Adobe, Articulate and Qarbon provide sophisticated rapid e-learning tools. as the rapid e-learning growing, more and more companies reach this field, such as Tanida and Wondershare. Their software are all conformant for AICC/SCORM, which are widely used as universal LMS standards. Programming skills is not necessary for e-learning authoring. Rapid e-learning are getting better.
We have started to put the means for rapid content development in the hands of SMEs in our organisation and the benefits are immediately evident.
The SMEs have the knowledge, the users understand the context and we, the learning professionals provide the strategy for the approach to on the job content development. It’s a combined approach that gets the best out of everyone and realises something of value to workers.
What we had to let go of was the whole “but we are the instructional designers” mindset. Rapid content design doesn’t have the luxury of time to include the complexities of ISD. It’s all about locating problems, quick design and rapid delivery. And it’s more about information delivery than learning anyway. Who really cares if people learn the content – as long as people can perform the task at hand when they need to, learning is almost superfluous.
Let’s remember that children are producing sophisticated videos and podcasts that often rival what comes out of Articulate or Captivate. We can’t put that access to tools back in the box.
Recently I came across one really good post on PowerPoint to flash converters:
http://katarinanovak.edublogs.org/2008/05/05/which-powerpoint-to-flash-converter-is-the-best-one/
After reading it I tried iSpring Pro and it didn’t disappoint my expectations.
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