So you are going to start delivering elearning in your organisation. In order to do this successfully, you will need to gather the right skills to develop engaging professional content that will deliver the learning objectives required. Let’s take a quick look at some of the people and skills you may need on your project. Often you will find people with multiple skills, or you may need various people with specific skills, but by working alongside such specialists will enable you to pick up skills that you can use on your own in the future. Learning Content Team Instructional designer

An instructional designer creates instructional material for learning. They often assess learner needs and determine goals and outcomes for learning

Subject matter expert

A subject matter expert is an expert in a particular area that learning materials are going to be created for. This could be the in-house CRM guru or the product manager for a technical product.

Graphic designer

The graphic designer is there to make the learning content look great. From creating templates to page layouts, styling diagrams and selecting images, a graphic designer will add polish to your course.

Flash Developer

At times you may need to add complex interactions and simulations. To do this you are probably going to need a flash developer. Flash content is typically developed in Adobe Flash and requires specialised skills.

Multimedia developer

If you are lucky your graphic designer or flash developer may be able to handle the additional elements that can be used in elearning content. However, if they are unable to, a multimedia developer will be able to assist you in creating such elements. If you are working with video the multimedia developer will provide you with the video and audio editing and signal processing skills, as well as encoding multimedia formats appropriately for playback.

Learning Management System (LMS) Team

LMS administrator

The LMS administrator is essentially the power user for the system. They will understand the configuration and setup options and how to map the LMS functionality to the organisation’s processes and learning needs. They will also understand how to set up and configure courses utilising all of the course tools.

LMS course manager

A LMS course manager may be involved in setting up courses, but more likely they are there to guide students through the learning content and assess non-automated assessment items and liaise with students who are having difficulty with the learning content.

Help Desk

Depending on the size of your organisation and IT environment, you may need to have a help desk person to deal with students’ technical issues.

Elearning Update

Elearning 2.0

To get a sense of eLearning 2.0, it’s helpful to have some sense of what Web 2.0 is. Probably the most cited article on this is from Tim O’Reilly called “What is Web 2.o?”

Emerging E-Learning Technology: Podcasts

One of the emerging technologies associated with E-Learning today is incorporating the use of podcasts into E-Learning course delivery.

Pros And Cons – Pros And Cons Of E-Learning

E-learning has shown its great advantages through its accessibility to all students irrespective of their residence.

Concept Design Tools

Designers of digital products and services like ourselves can dramatically improve our work by generating more concepts early in our projects. This article tries to make concept design easier to learn by illustrating three simple tools for generating concepts.

Choosing The Right Content-Authoring Tool For Your E-Learning Needs

There are several hundred e-Learning tools out in the marketplace today. Selecting the proper course-authoring tool for developing your company’s online training content is no small undertaking.

1. No Overall Aim.

Make sure students understand why they are taking the course and what they’ll get out of it.

2. Vague planning.

Decide what you want students to learn and how they’ll learn it. Vague aims will not usually suffice. Find out the technical options. The course must be defined in those terms. The first slide will contain this video in this format, we’ll use this font, we’ll use pictures here, video there, and so on. Write it all down. Discuss it with colleagues. Test your ideas on prospective students. Don’t be afraid to ask developers to explain things.

3. Poorly designed content.

Many elearning modules are bland. They have too much text. Elearning should be interactive. It should look good. Video, animation, sound and good design can really help. Before you start, find out about what the technology offers. How can you use it? For instance, how will you use forums? Quizzes? Audio? Animation? Video? Drag and drop?

4. Hard to use. The course doesn’t work on student computers. Lack of testing.

The course and the LMS must be easy to use. If it is not user friendly then people will avoid using it. Make it easy to enrol, take the course and review results. Test the course on typical student computers. Consider bandwidth, browser versions, firewalls, operating systems, and so on. For instance, will student internet connections be fast enough to watch video playback?

6. Inadequate tracking of enrolments and results.

Who has enrolled? Who has completed the course? Who is failing? These sorts of questions are answered by tracking student interaction with the course. You can only get answers based on the information gathered. So when you test your course with typical students, test the reports being generated too. Make sure that all the information you need is being recorded. Make sure that the system records what you want before real students start taking your course.

7. Stakeholders not consulted.

Every stakeholder needs to be aware of the aims of the elearning program. Where possible, involve all stakeholders in appropriate parts the project. For instance, make sure adminstrative staff are happy with the reports generated by the LMS.

8. Poor support.

Good support means a support desk, an online forum and FAQs. Without access to support, learners will become despondent if they encounter a problem. When you solve problems, add the solution to a FAQ or a forum. Prefereably one students and staff can search.

9. Poor workflow integration.

The most important step is to integrate the elearning program with business processes. Make sure the way it integrates is supported by all management.

10. Forgetting business aims.

For example, does the course improve efficiency and reduce expenses? Does it reduce training contact time? Ask these sorts of questions. Can these things be quantified financially? Does the course represent a good return on investment?