For years, it seems that everyone in our field has beenlooking for ways to produce eLearning on a shoestring. In fact, my debut as a voicein the L&D industry came with publication of my first book, eLearning Solutions on a Shoestring,back in 2005. (Note: DO NOT buy a copy! It’s still available here and there andis woefully out of date. Feel free to buy any of my other books, though…) While so many great new inexpensive tools, open-sourceresources, creative design techniques, and friendlier pricing models haveemerged, a few things seem to remain constant.
Not understanding the reality of development
“But if we buy the magicGee-Whiz Acme eLearning Generatorizer, our courses will be interactive andengaging!” I’ve said this manytimes, but great eLearning is about thoughtful design more than it is about software: You can’t push a Kia into a carwashand expect it to come out a Lexus. In the right hands a great authoring toolcan certainly help, but just throwing an expensive tool at inexperienced oruntrained designers isn’t going to get you a better product.
Not knowing what you already have
Years ago, Ina Fried of CNET News reported: “In usertesting, Microsoft found that nine out of every 10 features that customerswanted to see added to Office products were already in the program.” And here, in 2017, I still get the occasional call frompeople who will, for instance, want to buy a tool because it will “let them addnarration to PowerPoint.” I’ve seen shops where staff already have access toproduct X and a manager decides everyone must have product Y without realizingit replicates half the features already offered by product X. I often see duplication of licenses for similar clip art or character galleries and templatelibraries.
The tech that will “change training forever”
In my career, I’ve seen everything from video discs to smartboards to AR and VR touted as the thing that is going to solve all ourproblems. Pay attention and invest wisely, but be careful. A trainingcolleague, formerly a middle-school teacher, tells this story: In the late1970s the school’s principal returned from a conference enamored of a newtechnology called the “VRC.” (That is not a typo. He thought it was “VRC,” not“VCR.”) At the next faculty meeting, the principal announced that the VRC wasthe “wave of the future” that would “change classroom instruction forever.” Hethen said he’d spent more than half of the next year’s budget on beta video cameras and other equipment.His plan: to tape his teachers delivering their “best lessons” (fractions,geography, and so forth), which middle-school students would then be eager towatch at their leisure. The result: unwatched videos, wasted time, and the lossof half the annual budget.
Cart before the horse
A real recent email: “I want to buy this library of onlinecourses. Do you have any assessment tools I can use to show management why weneed it?”
Other missteps:
- The large company that estimated first-year eLearningcourse usage at 30,000 people and purchased licenses accordingly. Actualfirst-year usage: 2,000.
- The agency that bought a product, unaware thatrunning it would require the purchase of another product.
- The school that bought an authoring program socomplex that no one could ever figure it out.
- The training unit that purchased an LMS thatdidn’t fit with any of the organization’s other data systems.
- The Midwestern state government system with suchpoor internal communication that at one point 40 different agencies hadnegotiated 40 different contracts—with the same eLearning vendor.
- The organization that spent half its eLearningbudget on expensive game-creation software: Only one person can run it, andemployees are already sick of being “gameshowed.”
So what?
While we’ve come a long way at helping those working onlimited budgets, we still see lots of areas for savings—which can free up fundsfor more savvy buying. Sometimes it’s making sure staff have the training andskills they need to use products well. Sometimes it means finding a way toinventory existing resources. In nearly all cases it’s a matter of getting better educated, or helping those above us become better educated, aboutoptions. Be careful of the real costs that can come from having lack ofstrategy, lack of research, and wrong decisionmakers.
Want more?
Interested in learning more about tools for creatingeLearning on a shoestring? Check out Tracy Parish’s great compilation of resources.
