This simple but often forgotten step in the development process
can maximize the course shelf life of your e-learning
programs.
At a recent meeting, the director of training operations at a
global biopharmaceutical company was asked a fairly simple and
straightforward question: "What keeps you awake at night?"
After thinking about it for a moment, she said, "Well, my group is
developing more than 50 new courses this year, and I'm not too
worried about those. My problem is that we now have more than 400
courses in our LMS and, because of application upgrades,
organizational changes, and general changes with our learning and
development environment, about 50 percent of the courses needed to
be updated this year. With my staff fully utilized with the new
development efforts, I honestly don't know how I'm going to
maintain all of those lessons."
The recent proliferation of e-learning development in the workplace
has added an extra layer of complexity to course maintenance. There
are now many more courses packaged into shorter, more highly
focused segments to accommodate learners who want to pick and
choose only the training topics that they really need. To make
matters worse, today's blended learning solutions require numerous
delivery methods, and some of those components, such as performance
support systems, information repositories, online user guides, and
others, are not even under our control.
The truth is that even before blended learning became the norm for
training in the workplace, course maintenance was often overlooked
or even forgotten as a step in training development methodologies:
The ADDIE process (analyze, design, develop, implement, and
evaluate) ends with evaluation. Human performance improvement is a
circular process that does not touch on maintenance. Walter Dick
and Lou Carey's systematic approach only briefly touches on course
maintenance, and their approach was designed in the early 1970s. In
other words, you are more or less on your own to determine the
steps you need to take to minimize your maintenance effort.
Keep e-learning from becoming obsolete
If the maintenance nightmare hasn't disturbed your sleep yet,
consider this recent real-life example:
In the spring of 2009, Mike Costello, training director at Thermo
Fisher, introduced a new training module that was deployed to
approximately 35,000 employees. The training course contained many
references to the executive-level organizational structure and was
proudly announced in the company's weekly newsletter. However, in
that same newsletter, a new CEO and a new division were announced,
making the training obsolete on its first official day.
Keeping this example in mind, let's discuss some steps that can
help to reduce your maintenance nightmares.
Create and implement a content indexing system.
There are a number of instructional design tips for reducing the
maintenance burden, but at the core of your environment, there must
be a cross-referencing index that contains a list of all topics
that are covered in all courses. With it, you can pinpoint all
courses affected by a system or organizational change and
effectively plan for the future. Without it, you can use your
dartboard and hope that your luck holds up for a while longer.
What type of tool do you need for this type of index? A database
tool is ideal of course, but you can get off to a very good start
with a simple spreadsheet. Essentially, you want to make sure that
you are tracking two types of information in the index:
- course identifiers, including information such as course name,
course ID, publish date, course type, audience, and author
- course content, including the course topics, tools, and
materials used to teach the course. Do not simply copy the table of
contents into this section. You will want to know if the course
requires a flip-chart from a vendor who has gone out of business or
if the course will only run in Internet Explorer 6.0. Add all
content references that may change over time and all elements that
are needed to run the lesson.
Use your information repositories. When designing
and developing your courses, think about the information
repositories that are available to your audiences. In almost every
organization, there are a wide variety of repositories that store
detailed information regarding people, processes, procedures, and
more. Instead of including every single detail in your training
course, simply point to the repositories and instruct your learners
how to find the information. This step by itself can drastically
reduce your maintenance work.
For your course exercises, don't forget to include a search for
specific repository information as part of one or more of the
exercises. If you are teaching a software application, your course
exercise could include steps that require the learner to find
specific information in the application's online help or an online
user guide that is stored on your network. Make sure that your
learners know where the repositories are and how to use them.
To make the training worthwhile, offer tips for accessing the
information quickly. For example, if the information resides on
your company intranet, remind learners that they can access a
frequently used intranet page immediately by dragging the site icon
from their browser's URL field to their desktops.
Avoid "time stamp" wording. When you proofread
your training materials, eliminate any wording that contains a time
stamp. This would include wording that refers to a product or
program as "new" and terms such as "this year" and "next year."
Along those lines, avoid mentioning a specific version number when
describing software applications. For example
- high-maintenance phrase: "Internet Explorer 7.0.533.1 has many
new features."
- low-maintenance phase: "Internet Explorer has many useful
features."
If you really need to specify a version number, try to avoid
specific point release details and refer to the application as
"Internet Explorer 7" or "Internet Explorer 7.x."
Make employees generic. The simple rule here is to
avoid specific employee names whenever possible, and remember that
even pictures of employees can lead to problems. The more specific
you are with references to employees, the more you may need to
update or maintain your materials. Whenever possible, refer to "our
chief marketing officer," not "Jane Doe, our chief marketing
officer."
Also, include as many generic pictures as possible by using one of
the many online photo providers. For many reasons, it's nice to put
your colleagues' faces in your lessons, but the more company faces
that you put in your materials, the more you are risking that the
materials will become out of date.
Let's face it. People simply do not stay at one organization for
life anymore. When attrition happens, and your courses are full of
references to specific employees, you have created an extra
maintenance requirement that you may have been able to avoid very
easily.
Set up email notification for the information
repositories. To ensure that you are aware when changes
happen to key information in your information repositories, set up
automatic email notifications within the repository. Many systems
(such as SharePoint) have this capability, but few users take
advantage of it. If in doubt, check with your IT administrator.
Be creative with narration. If you design a lengthy e-learning
lesson and then need to update a handful of pages in the
courseware, how are you going to update the narration? Will you be
able to easily get the same narrator so you can maintain
consistency throughout the lesson? If the narrator works for your
company, if they are still employed there, and if they have the
time available to record the changes, you're all set. However, this
approach leaves a lot to chance - and includes many "ifs."
Think ahead. If you are developing e-learning
lessons with narration, consider using two or more narrators,
providing more options for any potential updates needed. Find just
one of the original narrators to record the new narration, or
simply find someone else that sounds similar to one of the original
voices.
Resistance (to maintenance) is futile
Aside from the specific recommendations in this article, the most
important general recommendation to help you with your maintenance
burden is to simply have a maintenance plan when you design your
development plan. For example, if you are using ADDIE as your
process model for instructional design, make sure that you add an
"M" (for maintenance) at the end. The ADDIE-M (think: Wizard of
Oz) model will force you to look beyond the deployment of your
course and to plan for things that will save you time and effort in
the years ahead.
If done correctly, this simple but often forgotten step in the
development process can maximize your course shelf life, and that
will allow you to focus on other important matters - like not
keeping awake at night because of your overwhelming maintenance
workload.
Mark Simon is a senior training specialist
at the eClinical Solutions Division of Eliassen Group and has more
than 20 years of hands-on experience with design, development, and
delivery of e-learning and instructor-led training; msimon@eclinicalsol.com.