eLearning & Deliberative Moments

Shovel Museum
Originally uploaded by misterbisson.

I received an email yesterday:

I am trying to find an expert Authorware developer for a project for my company. The project involves external data basing of text and audio content to be displayed through a packaged Authorware file suitable for intra-net deployment. Do you have any availability to look at this?

Here was my response:

Thanks for writing!

While I continue to receive invitations to build training solutions with Authorware, I took the decision two years ago to focus on collaborative adult learning.

Your desire is to build a database-driven training application. This is not a trivial project--I have built several such systems over the years. Since they already exist in droves, consider licensing something that is proven rather than starting from scratch. The eLearningGuild could provide several good leads.

I am proud of the systems I created. They had many dozens of screen templates, each with distinct layouts and interactivity. I designed them so that each was flexible too, allowing for varying object counts (eg clickable graphics) and text sizes. But while my clients were always enthusiastic about the quality of my deliverables, end-user evaluations were never stellar. Why? Quite simply, nobody gets excited about spending hours stepping through pages and pages of content. We used to say that content was king. Well that was so 1995.

Please ask yourself seriously whether or not a database-driven system is actually going to provide a valuable outcome for staff, or whether it is primarily to satisfy some mandate for training. Should technical maintainability be more important than the end-user experience? Let me be blunt, as I have nothing to lose here: if you were one of those employees who had to enrol in the learning, what would make the most impact on you? What would help you solve problems and carry appropriate attitudes and behaviours in your work? What would make you proud to be an employee of an enterprise that cared about your welfare and performance? What would transform you into a responsible everyday learner for the enterprise?

Instead of a 100-screen page-turner, just give them a low-cost PDF document. Give them a randomised online test, that's okay, just to demonstrate to the regulators that they've read it. Next, provide an online forum for staff to comment and discuss the document and learn from each other. You know, they are adults who bring their own experiences and knowledge to the enterprise.

Then build a half dozen simulations or highly-interactive problem solving exercises. They don't need to be 3D, in fact they might be predominantly text-based. Just as long as they are engaging. They might have to refer to their documentation to get through them. Make them think, surprise them, let them laugh at themselves, challenge their misguided views, let them fail before succeeding. Every few months, build another exercise based on staff suggestions. Use Authorware to build these, it's perfect.

Finally, connect your learners with each other online. During training, let them "call a friend"--another staff member by email. Create a community. Get them recording, sharing and archiving their on-the-job experiences. This is the new world of collaborative learning.

Best of success to you, and thanks again for inviting me to contribute.

Posted by rlubensky on 04 January 2008 at 12:15 PM | Permalink