Nuts and Bolts: Characteristics of Successful eLearning Practitioners

TheeLearning Guild’s recent research report, eLearningon a Shoestring, got methinking about something else. In profiling three practitioners in very differentsettings, the commonalities in personality and approach were inescapable. WhileTracyParish is inhealthcare, Bianca Woods was in banking, and CadenceConsulting’s LeonieBlack works with a number of organizations, these successful eLearning practitionersshare a number of characteristics that support their success.

My earliestinterest in eLearning, which I can track back to about 1999, was accompanied byan interest in low-cost solutions. I was a one-person training department in agovernment agency back in the day when images involved an actual camera, youhad to have FTP software and server access to put anything online, andPhotoshop was complicated $600 software. I had a lot of success with creatingour early online courses at minimal cost, and as authoring capabilities goteasier and cheaper and more staff got interested in design and development Imoved on to other online endeavors. Although my new focus was primarily the useof social tools and digital technologies, I still oversaw our eLearning effortsand offered occasional updates to information about evolving products andapproaches.

Update: After I submitted this article forpublication, Tracy Parish won the DevLearn 2018 DemoFest Award for the BestMobile Solution category (Figure 1). Her entry: Creating a Conference App UsingStoryline.

Figure1: TracyParish receiving her DevLearn 2018 DemoFest Award from Mark Britz  

Technical competence

Having a deep-levelunderstanding of tools—what they are at their root, a basic grasp of coding andhow products are built, and being skilled with a number of tools and programs—allenable the pursuit of low-cost solutions. It can help as you compare productsand features and better understand the details of purchasing or testing tools. Bonus:Many freeand low-cost tools come with little or no support. So themore you know, the better you can troubleshoot, participate in user forums,and, should you contact support, the more clearly you can articulate what youneed. Sometimes products are low-cost because they are new, and companieswanting to communicate with smart early users will offer help in the form ofextended trials, access to additional features, and input on productimprovements.  

Willingness to explore

Intervieweesall spoke to doing things just to see if they could be done: Tracy Parish, forinstance, built her “MasterMind” game,complete with 160 variables and more than 2,100 triggers, mostly just to see ifshe could. They were willing to try, and hack, and just click the link to seewhat would happen. This interestin exploring is supported by a tolerance for ambiguity and willingnessto make mistakes. Among other things, exploration helps you maximize what youhave: Woods, for instance, hacked PowerPoint for creating everything fromconsolidated instructor/participant materials to video output to eBooks. Likethe others who spoke of relishing the intellectual pursuit of findingsolutions, Woods says she enjoys the challenge of asking, “How do I poke at this thing and get it to do stuff that the tooldesigners had no intention of anyone ever doing?”

Investingin self-development

Therespondents, curious and sharing a thirst for learning more, fit the definitionof “self-directedlearner.” They identify their learning needs and seek outworkshops, websites, user forums, and other opportunities for development.Parish spoke of her habit of checking in to the Articulate help forum andlooking for unanswered questions: she says helping others always teaches hersomething as well.

“Justdo it.”

A striking feature of the interviews was the utter lack of complainingabout having a small budget or letting that cause delays or serve as a way ofmaking excuses. Proving oneself as credible and building a good relationshipwith management went a long way toward getting things done even with littlemoney. The desire to find a way seems to have overridden what might have been,for others, a discouraging lack of resources.