Lesson 2 E-Learning in the Context of Your Organization
2-3 Expensive and Intensive E-Learning
Does E-learning Really Need to Be So Expensive? So Team-Intensive?
It’s possible to create an effective online program on a low budget as a “lone ranger” without a team, but it can stretch the initiator very thin if he or she works all alone and is expected to make time to develop e-learning in addition to routine job responsibilities. This is the way many initiatives in community colleges, smaller universities, and nonprofit organizations have begun—one person, perhaps with a small grant or a bit of release time, doing the whole thing as a tactical move to solve a short-term problem, rather than as a strategic move serving the organization’s big-picture goals. On the other hand, when a business undertakes an e-learning initiative, it tends to be more strategic and long-term, with resources dedicated accordingly.
Participants in this program have often defined their projects as a “pilot” or demonstration segment of limited scope that they can realistically handle on their own, with the sensible goal of having something tangible they can later use as “show-and-tell” when seeking more budgetary and other support from organizational decision makers. So don’t let lack of budget and project support scare you away. Instead, even if your current project needs to be of limited scale, plan from the very start to anticipate issues of scalability. Write your design document as if this were a larger scale project and then focus in on a feasible segment. Plan for team roles as if you had such team members, even if you need to wear all the hats yourself for awhile. Your project or something similar may grow to fill a larger role in your organization than seems likely at the moment, and it’s smart to plan for this so that you’ll be ready with the skills and insights needed to lead such a project when the opportunity arises.
A Note About Academic vs. Industry E-Learning
While many good techniques for e-learning design are held commonly between industry and academia, the style and focus will necessarily be different for objectives that are primarily about:
- procedural, near-transfer skills training or memorization (more common in workplace training), and
- knowledge acquisition, critical thinking, and expanding the learner’s context (more common in academia)
In the first instance, training will be more task oriented; it might focus on performance or behavior goals; it might have a specific, finite objective that’s easy to measure; it will frequently be developed by a team and have funds allocated for media and design; it may be evaluated based on demonstrated return on investment.
In the second instance, learning will focus on exposure to new ideas and information; it will encourage critical analysis and will often use more collaborative or exploratory models; the goals may be more about meta-cognition: a-ha moments, igniting curiosity, problem solving; the assessment may be more generative (like building a project or portfolio).
Academic courses like this one fall clearly into the second category, and something like learning to use PowerPivot in Excel is obviously in the first category. However, there is definitely some crossover. Ethics or leadership training in a corporation might be more in the second category, and a university nursing or language course might use techniques more common in the first category.
⭐ Shar’s Note: I usually think of training as a one-and-done situation and academic learning as needing the ability to go back and access materials again. And because of that distinction, I’m always reluctant to build academic content in a platform where the learner cannot easily retrieve the resources.