Learning Leaders Forum

The Rise of the Corporate Learning Content Rock Star

The job description read, “Leverage your knowledge and experience to develop learning content in written, audio, video, and other formats that will be available to workers on an enterprise wide basis through deployment on the corporate information infrastructure. This will include wiki’s, forums, and blogs, as well as both informal and formal training assets.” I heard Steven Spielberg applied for this position and was turned down. So who is this job description addressed to? To answer that question, we should probably get some perspective.

Planning e-Learning Development Resources

Recently I have gotten a lot of questions regarding e-learning development and ways to quantify the effort to produce e-learning. Like all of us, I see estimates from 80 hours to 600 hours as the number of development hours required to produce one hour of finished e-learning. This wide range of estimates is not particularly helpful in trying to plan e-learning development so I will attempt to develop a more precise way to plan for e-learning development resources.   To start my research, I went to Go ogle and typed in “training development ratios” and began to read through the 2,020,000 articles that my query produced. Fortunately, a colleague had already done this research and posted it on his blog Big Dog & Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition. In reviewing his research, I focused on what I thought to be the most common type of e-learning course. This was categorized as “standard’, “average”, or “medium” and the estimates of how many hours it took to develop a single hour of training seemed to average around 180 hours of development for one hour of finished e-learning.

Podcasts and On-line Training

Building "Just-in-time" and spontaneous training into your companies training portfolio is a key to success as part of today's advanced training strategies. Here is an example of an innovative implementation of this strategy.

Denver's Cable Center is offering a series of on-line courses to introduce people to the Cable Industry. Here is a sample of the newly introduced CableSTART
course. 
 
CableSTART is a fundamental course for those needing an understanding of the cable industry’s development, basic business models, products, and some of its key competitors. Ideal for those new to the industry and for those needing a refresher. This is a one time use for one PC for 30 days. More details...

The Life and Times of Virtual Brenda

When you work in an industry long enough, you get the feeling you’ve gained great wisdom and have seen pretty much every situation there is to see. Well, as you might guess, I felt like I had reached that pinnacle. At least until I received a call from one of our customers who ask me if I could stop by and discuss a project they were evaluating.
 
When I arrived, we sat down in a conference room and began to review an e-learning curriculum that had been developed and expanded over the last several years. The training was well done and designed around a local talent who played the role of Brenda in the training courses. Brenda was the sage person of wisdom who put the training in context and provided a consistent presence across the fairly large curriculum. So, the training was very good, Brenda was professional and provided the insight and continuity that were critically needed, and it seemed all was well. I began to wonder why I was sitting there.

Some Inspiration After a Tough Year

When our sons were growing up, we would spend hours at swim meets. Of the many sports that our sons participated in, swimming was by a large margin the most difficult for us as parents. The day would start at about 6:00 in the morning on a perfectly good Saturday. It was a spring sport so the weather was always unpredictable. Often we would see steam wafting off the bodies of the young swimmers as they got out of the water to practice their racing dives from the blocks. You knew that it was cold. So there we would be, 6:00 on a perfectly good spring Saturday morning watching with only the heartache the parent can feel as he watches his child shivering uncontrollably in a cloud of steam that reminded me of the last picture I saw of polar bears looking for fish. But that was only the beginning.

The Evolution of the LMS

The origins of the learning management system (LMS) are unclear. Some accounts portray the development of the first LMS as a tool needed to quantify and report learning in support of a Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award application. Another account involves a large government agency developing the first LMS to handle a large volume of learning development and delivery.

My guess is that many individuals and organizations have made significant contributions to early learning management technology. From these simple beginnings, the LMS has evolved into an enterprisewide presence that many consider essential to corporate success.

There is More to Training Than Just Developing Courses

We have found the hour that a learner spends in training is only a fraction of the total time and resource that must be committed to support that hour. This is especially true in the age of learner directed training. The activities that must support that hour of training are numerous.

Here are some examples:

The New Role of e-Learning?

Our business world is changing and the role of training is changing as well. We see employees, partners, and customers becoming increasing responsible for their own development and more comfortable with technology. The pace of business is increasing with less tolerance for wasted time or resources. New products and processes are being introduced faster than ever and the business world has become increasingly competitive with no room for mistakes or false starts.