I’m wary of tools that promise “rapid” authoring.
It’s not that speed is inherently a bad thing. An instructional designer’s expertise usually improves speed, for example… and I’ll never turn down a new computer that performs better than one that’s gotten old and sluggish. Those improvements come from doing the same thing more efficiently (and, often, better).
But it’s worth taking a look at where speed improvements come from. For example, most instructional designers get asked to do a lot of shovelware (taking policy documents and PowerPoints from in-person training and “shoveling” them quickly into eLearning). Due to the pandemic, the demand for shovelware almost certainly spiked about a year ago, and depending on your organization, it may still be standard operating procedure. Speed that comes at the expense of design is almost always ill advised (although there are times that emergency circumstances may override our best intentions).
However, I suspect most of us aren’t aware how much time we’re spending on processes that just aren’t necessary… things that can even be eliminated without decreasing instructional effectiveness. The first time I used an authoring tool that was built for authoring reflowable text (in my case, Rise), the staggering number of hours in my career that I had spent lining things up just right in slide-based tools (like Lectora, Captivate, and Storyline) loomed large in my head.
I was aware that the toolset I was working with was limited, but holy moly was it easier to create something that looked good, as compared to slide-based tools. If I needed to change something, the rest of the content just… adjusted around it. There was far less re-work than I normally had to do. It’s hard to overstate the speed improvement of authoring reflowable content, as opposed to authoring slides.
And what benefit did all of that lining up text in slide-based tools deliver for my learners? There’s no doubt that affect is important, but what if I could have achieved a polished, professional, attractive appearance without spending all that time? Slide-based tools provide an excellent canvas for highly visual, beautiful work, but they can also set up the expectation that you need to create art. And while we all love art, it’s worth questioning whether the time spent pays off in terms of instructional effectiveness. Added to that, the time spent reworking learning experiences when something changes can be even more significant, and can make it difficult to respond quickly to changes in policies and current events.
Aside from the authoring speed, reflowable text is also very powerful in terms of the improved experience on the learner side. About 10 years ago, HTML5 revolutionized how websites responded on an exploding market of mobile devices, and we now have a decent-sized market of tools that author web-friendly content: content that reflows in accordance with learners’ expectations, can be read by screen readers, and requires far less in terms of proprietary plugins.
That power on the learner side that means tools that are built for reflowable content have an additional speed advantage on the authoring side: They utilize single-source authoring, which means that instead of authoring several versions of each screen—one for desktops/laptops, one for tablets, and one for phones—you author once and the output is responsive to the size and shape of the browser window.
The issue with a lot of our tools, though, is that while they provide easy authoring and improved experiences across devices, they don’t necessarily have the advanced feature set behind them that our favorite slide-based tools have. We run the risk of shoveling out content because it’s easy, and focusing less on creating powerful learning experiences. That’s because not all of the tools support interactivity and adaptivity… much less collaboration, spaced repetition, and analytics.
But tools for reflowable content output the same kind of code that is used all over the internet—and instructional designers are certainly interested in delivering the interactive experiences we know are more effective than static content—so why are the learning experiences delivered by most eLearning authoring tools more limited than regular web content?
Next month I’ll return with more examination of the powerful possibilities that even reflowable content can deliver, as we prepare to launch PeBL Pro.
Article sponsored by:
