Nuts and Bolts: How Can We Know What We Don’t Know?

Last month’s column “Buy or Build?” and thedecision-making flowchart included there, sparked an interesting comment from readerJohn Lundholm, “Sometimes organizations go to great trouble and expense to build(often inferior) eLearning in-house because they don’t really know what their otheroptions are.”

It’s true that often we don’t knowwhat we don’t know. Some common problems? The in-house decision makers:

• Assume building will be quick and easy,
• Assume buying will be expensive,
• Assume custom development will be exorbitant, and
• Assume partial customization isn’t possible.

Whatever your final decision, it’simportant that you make it on a sound knowledge base. Here are some suggestionsfor developing an understanding of real costs of development, outsourcing, oroff-the-shelf purchases.

Read it

You can start here, with thiscolumn every first Tuesday. The rest of Learning Solutions Magazine is richwith help for you. Also read Clark & Mayer’s eLearning and the Science of Instruction and Clark Aldrich’s Complete Guide to Serious Games & Simulations(reviewed at https://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/467/book-review-the-complete-guide-to-simulations–serious-games-by-clark-aldrich).Start evaluating the reality between what we know to be “good” onlineinstruction and what realistically you can develop. Then ask yourself, “Can Ido this? Can my company create anything of this quality? ”

See it

Join the eLearning Guild and readwhat the organization sends you. Go to conferences. Visit conference expo halls.Download conference apps and review handouts and resource materials (I don’tgive out copies of slides [what IS that about?] but provide links to referencesand examples via diigo for all my presentations, some of which I update longafter the actual event). Even if you can’t make the big national orinternational conferences, look for local training-association chapter eventsor other networking opportunities in your area. Follow conference backchannelslike those actively nurtured during the eLearning Guild events DevLearn andLearning Solutions (https://davidkelly.me/2012/03/learning-solutions-2012-conference-backchannel-collected-resources-lscon/).Sign up for the online Guild forums. Watch especially for the results of courseor learning game development competitions and showcases, like DevLearn’s annualDemoFest. Learn the names of vendors and keep an eye out especially fordiscussions of costs or fee schedules.

Try it

Lots of authoring companies andoff-the-shelf purveyors offer free trial periods or limited guest access tocourses. Don’t rely on just viewing demos, but take advantage of these to testthe authoring tools against your idea of a program you want to create; thelearning curve might surprise you. Take some of the eLearning courses todevelop a better understanding of good, bad, intuitive, and boring. (One of myfavorite tricks: choose a topic you might need in your world, like hiringpractices or ethics or some such, and review every online course you can findon it. The variance in quality is quite stunning.) Talk to vendors – just talk.Don’t make them spend 40 hours completing a RFP if you aren’t serious or arejust fishing. Ask instead for price and fee schedules. Find out your options:for instance, will the inexpensive addition of a welcome screen to anoff-the-shelf course “customize” it to your needs? Can you outsource aparticularly tricky piece of programming or custom art? Consider specifics ofyour reality: a development company with a history in creating training courseson, for instance, new time sheet systems will likely be able to just work morequickly than you.

Want to save on outsourcing development?

Get your act together. The developers can’t work if you don’tgive them what they need. Get clear on your expectations and performanceobjectives. Learn – and teach others – how to review storyboards as “bigpicture” views of a finished product, not excuses to argue for days about thecolor of an avatar’s shirt. Fix your internal processes, like an over-fondnessfor meetings and imaginary deadlines. Assemble assets, like photos of the CEO,logos, maps, directions, links, and reference materials, into one place. Every callfrom a developer looking for an image or document will run up the price. Developmentcompany WeeJee Learning’s Ian Huckabee says he welcomes calls from potentialclients looking to develop something new or rethink an existing classroomprogram in an online format, and stresses the “knowing what you want” factor ascritical to reasonable pricing and quick turnaround.

The quick version

In short? Per last month’s flowchart you should build only if the content is truly proprietary and you have alarge potential audience. Even if the conditions tell you to build, buildingwith the help of experts may give you a better product more quickly at lessexpense than you’d ultimately incur doing it yourself.