Much has been said and written about “rapid eLearning development” over the last several years. This was in response to the need to produce more content, in less time.

Historically we have had to choose between the devil’s triangle of Quality, Price and Time. As the sign in the butcher shop says, “Pick any two out of three:”

With the economic downturn, I’m sensing a shift in the conversation. Now we are hearing clients say, “Not good enough figure it out!  We need the same Quality, Faster and at a lower Price!”

The answer lies in innovation. The only way to change the shape of the triangle  is to innovate and automate. That’s where the concept of an ecosystem comes in. If you break down the components required to build a quality eLearning program you uncover the answers. We partnered to build an ecosystem that drives down the total cost of ownership for each eLearning course.

How?

Automation:

We automated the development cycle so that when the Instructional Designer is finished the storyboard, most of the development is done, including flash animations, audio, and graphics. This includes custom flash components, screen layouts and interfaces.

All the files are stored in one place and review comments are tagged to specific screens.

Innovation:

We created the option to request development work from central location to be done at the best prices available worldwide.

• Pricing models are based on performance. Go ahead, get into the ecosystem, produce a product. Don’t pay until you publish it.
• Access state of the art support resources and link to other ecosystem members to help enable productivity.

The SHIFT eLearning ecosystem is the culmination of over 10 years of learning, continuous improvement and automation.

In my previous post, I looked at how professional skills are acquired after many hours of background research and practice. Which often requires hours upon hours of learning delivery. But let’s focus on what Corporate Executives are demanding of their workforce. They have hired the new employee, assuming that those hours have been logged and the primary skills have been acquired…for the most part.  Now you are on the payroll.  They need to provide you with JIT/JET education for the pressing business needs…..new products, new services, new alerts, new processes, new opportunities, etc. If they can do this successfully, and better than their competition, my business will be differentiated going forward.  With everyone competing for everything, everywhere, all the time, organizations must adapt their rapid learning strategies. Rapid is not only about how fast you get the information out, but more importantly, how fast does your employee/customer learn, implement, and change their behavior to address the new business need. How fast are your new employees oriented and approaching 80% effectiveness? How do we shrink your orientation results from 8 weeks to 4 weeks? How fast does your retail reps address customer concerns over new product launches. Post-launch, how fast do you alter/improve your training when the field tells you that the new training modules are not addressing the issues/challenges arising with the customers? 24 hours? 1 week? More? I would suggest you start making these kinds of commitments to your internal business partners to ensure that the training function is accountable for truncating the learning cycle down and creating an UBER-competitive asset for the organization.

Rapid eLearning – Let’s stop talking only about authoring. Let’s get our internal learning teams to start talking about total cost of ownership; speed of collaboration; access to learning by multiple stakeholders in parallel processes prior to course launch; speed of learning design. Today, a blended rapid learning strategy involves eLearning, discussion forums, blogs, video-casts, audio-casts, mentor availability and so much more. This all needs to happen with systems and governance. If it does, we can actually measure the results and focus on continuous improvement.

Spend your money wisely. Rapid learning is about systems, processes, a governance model, and instructional technique. The authoring tool is just an ‘enabler’. It is more of a paradigm SHIFT in learning versus a discussion about a particular medium or tool.

For eLearning, find out what the learner group needs now, deliver it rapidly in an educational and fun way, and determine when the learning modules have outlived their usefulness.  Store all of the learning assets centrally, maintain version control, seek collaboration with as many relevant subject matter experts as possible and continuously improve. You can do all of this and fast. Reducing costs and improving learning delivery. Find the right systems and put the processes in place.

“Learning at the speed of change” is a reference to the fact that change is the only constant and the speed of change is increasing. The speed with which an organization learns collectively and individually will determine their fate in the coming years.  Information overload is only going to get worse for everyone. We need to find a way to ensure that our focus in learning is on two things: quality of communications and our ability to extract value from massive amounts of information. Learning is not so much about pouring massive amounts of information into our brains all at once. It is about optimizing our social/professional networks and accessing new information JIT/JET – Just-in-time/Just-enough.

A Google search on the keywords “rapid eLearning” will offer up all kinds of forums and vendors discussing the relative merits of authoring software. Corporations have been discussing the JIT/JET approach to learning for decades. Why? Because, if it is done effectively, it provides for the best training ROI. It has been discussed and debated over and over at corporate education industry events for years. Yet, very few organizations can boast that an effective rapid learning strategy exists. Microsoft has decided to implement Microsoft Academy Mobile as an answers to their global sales training challenges. “Crowd source” the best learning content and make it available in a media rich social networking infrastructure. It is real-time sharing of client solutions, overcoming challenges, new products bundles, etc.   Effectively, rapid learning in a JIT/JET model. Whether it is canned elearning, traditional classroom, virtual classrooms, discussion board, life experience and so on, most of us learn best if the learning happens when we are most ready for it, and in manageable bite-sized morsels, or ‘coursels’ as some industry folks are calling it.

Does your learning strategy incorporate enough focus on innovative tactics for training people JIT/JET? I often find that many academics frown at the simplicity of concept. Yet the Gen Y’ers are demanding only a JIT/JET learning strategy and have very little patience for the information dump that occurs in sessions that last much longer than 20 minutes.  They want to know, what they need to know, as they recognize the need to know it.  Get it?

In my next post I’ll explore the practice of rapid eLearning and how, properly implemented, it can revolutionize how virtual learning is delivered.

I was recently in a meeting with a large client who was considering creating both and online and ILT delivered course.  We had a great conversation on how learners will go through the material and meet the compliance requirement.  I then asked them, “how are you going to ensure that the Learners have retained the content post training?” I was met with a sea of blank faces.  I further asked, “what is your strategy for allowing learners to learn from others who have been through similar situations or ask questions when confronted with a situation they are not sure how to deal with?”  Once again I was met with dazed expressions.

I then asked a simple question: “where would you go if you needed information on how to program your TV?”  One person said the manual, another said the company website and the last person said he would go to a Blog or discussion forum and find out what others who have the same TV have done.  I asked them then why wouldn’t you do the same thing for Learning.  Now I saw the lights going on around the room.  If we could create a discussion forum that allowed students to share their real world experiences about a topic then this would take a burden off the HR group.  I did suggest that the Online community be moderated to ensure people are kept on topic but for the most part learners would be able to share and learn organically.

In the end the client decided that this made great sense and really didn’t cost anything to setup and get running. They can do this for very little investment and then have a designated person moderate and be the expert to assist in answering the questions the community may not be able too.

This is a simple concept which if executed well can help foster ongoing learning and sharing in the organization making everyone stronger for the experience in participating.

Not long ago, our sister company MindMuze began offering a free eLearning Module on the H1N1 (Swine Flu) virus. Happily, this module proved very popular.

We’re very happy that it’s been so helpful to so many organizations. We got lots of enthusiastic feedback from people all over the world!

It was possible to develop the module very quickly thanks to the SHIFT rapid development eLearning tool. It’s a wonderful piece of technology that lets just about anyone develop eLearning applications. You don’t need to be an expert to use it; if you can put together a Powerpoint presentation, you can develop an eLearning module.

This tool has been creating a lot of interest in the industry. Partly this is due to the fact that it has a very low per-license cost. But best of all is the speed with which it allows courses to be developed. This is important in emergency situations, such as the outbreaks of SARS or H1N1. This allows you not only to respond quickly to sudden threats, but whip up learning tools in response to repetitive questions in IT support.

Translation is also easy, and there is also an existing library of images you can use.

If you are interested in learning more about SHIFT, please contact my colleague Mandana Rafat for more information.