Soft Skills

Customising that content

Sanjeev Fadnavis on the need for customised course development for every organisation.

When was the last time you thought of e-learning? Did you review the type of content that you would want to deploy on e-learning mode? Did you know that the actual job-related learning, specific to needs of an organisation, is more relevant than readymade courses? Well, these are just a few questions that should be uppermost in your mind while deciding on e-learning content strategy.

Content that is specific to an organisation’s staff and helps in the on-job performance is a custom course content. Learning such content helps in improving the KRAs (Key Result Areas) of employees in an organisation. It is imperative to understand that learners will come back with the demand for more e-learning courses only if the content is specific to their job.

Here is the 9 step approach to demonstrate the RoI progressively.

Step 1: Think positive and agree to global facts

Firstly, tell yourself that organisations, worldwide, are developing in-house content. If they are successful, there must be a way you can succeed too. You need not imitate but derive inspiration from them.

Step 2: Identify your e-learning champion

You must identify an e-learning champion within the organisation. Entrust him with the responsibility and allow him to allocate specific time-share. Most organisations in India want this champion to work on this initiative over and above his/her existing responsibilities, which is a wrong approach. Your e-learning initiative will get killed here itself. I can confidently say that he/she will find smart ways of getting out of the responsibility as fast as possible. That is all what you will practice as e-learning in your organisation. In short, it is very important for you to allow the champion to have his time-share to think over the approach and implement the strategy the way he has thought, to make it successful.

Step 3: Identify the right partner

While you derive inspiration from others, it is equally important to identify the right partner. It is essential to note that the experience of your partner is crucial for your success. Your partner should have the requisite experience backed by years of existence, proven capabilities and global recognition.

Step 4: Select the right technology

It is important to select the right technology for developing your content. Firstly, the technology should give you sufficient features to develop instructionally sound courses. Further, it should be able to leverage the existing legacy assets and allow multiple authors to share the course development material. Secondly, but most importantly, it should not require you to put in long programming and scripting hours. Get this technology adapted to all the stake holders. Ensure that it gives you a readymade framework for content development. Also make sure that it can integrate latest media objects within graphics, audio, video and flash. Of all the requirements, do not forget that it should be able to convert your courses complying to e-learning standards like SCORM/AICC. If you are a multi-geography organisation, see that the technology is unicode compliant so as to deploy the courses in multiple languages.

Step 5: Understand the methodology

What would you do if you were given a BMW when you don’t know how to drive a car? If technology selection helps you drive on an expressway, the methodology helps you to drive within the speed limits. Methodology helps you set realistic expectations and the path to meet these expectations. Some important steps in methodology are:

• Technology-orientation mapped with instructional orientation
• Understanding of the steps right from content analysis to delivering the final course output
• Initial brief exposure to instructional design which would mature over a period of time.

Step 6: Get the resources

Get the right resources to help your champion. While selection and adoption of the right methodology are the key success parameters, making available the requisite resources is equally important. A listing of such resources is given below.

• Content from SME
• SME time for content discussion
• Multimedia resource for organisation’s specific graphics
• Most important of all, the management support.

Interestingly, except for a multimedia resource none of the resources costs money directly. It is only a smart and selective time-share at the right point of time from the right kind of resource.

Step 7: Review your approach

Every incremental effort needs to be questioned and satisfactory answers need to be met. It would be advisable to develop your own questions because you are the master of your environment.

Step 8: Scale up

Now that you have the e-learning champion, the right partner, technology, methodology and have reviewed the approach, it’s time for you to scale up the development. It can be done by developing more content and deploying the content to more users.

The scaling up at this point of time will have less room for error. Thus, the process will be highly efficient and will have better buy-in.

Step 9: Upgrade

Adaptability of e-learning content is directly proportional to upgradability of the content. Since you have developed internal environment, your access to content, for making upgradations, is at your finger tips. Make the changes and let the content reflect the latest learning material.

Sanjeev Fadnavis is Associate VP, Business Development, Harbinger Knowledge Products.

E-mail: sanjeev@harbinger-systems.com