Building a team for digital L&D – part 1!

In one of my earlier blogs I mentioned the need for a ‘whole team’ approach when going digital. So this post is going to focus on the skills needed in the team to embrace e-learning. The first point to make is that the L&D function usually attracts a certain kind of person. Traditional training delivery has been standing up in front of a group of people with either a flip-chart or a PowerPoint presentation to hand. Skills that your average trainer required were presentation skills, facilitation skills to enable group discussion, and some design skills so that classroom training sessions could be designed. Obviously good one to one communication and negotiation skills were needed when working with internal customers in the business to scope out requirements.

So of these skills, which lend themselves to effective e-learning design and creation? Probably just the last one, the communication and negotiation skills that are needed to scope out requirements. Designing effective e-learning content is completely different to the creation of a classroom training session, because the medium itself is completely different. Therefore we should not assume that just because one is an excellent trainer, one would automatically be able to design e-learning.

The rise in the availability of authoring tools such as Articulate Storyline and Captivate have made it so that anyone can have a go at creating bespoke content, but we have learnt that it is best to break the process down into its different phases and draw on individuals that have skills in each area, with lots of peer review built in along the way.

In our team we have had great success in training up our administrators to use our authoring tools. The very nature of e-learning design projects is just that – they are projects – and sometimes you are waiting on your customer before you can proceed to the next phase, so using your administrators in this way is a great idea as they can fit the project work in and around other responsibilities. Of the 3 administrators in our team that use our author-ware they have all taken to it like a duck to water and really enjoy having something different to the usual reactive admin work to get their teeth into. Of course any content will have gone through a few stages before it reaches the ‘build’ stage, and that is where we have had our most challenges.

Assuming there is a clear brief and sign-off from the project sponsor on the outcomes required, there is an initial design phase. This requires a degree of creativity (which should be no problem for those with a training design background) – coupled with an understanding of the constraints and limitations of any authoring tools. Actually setting out and ‘scripting’ e-learning requires however more accurate and precise input than coming up with any creative concepts. The outcome of this stage is a detailed storyboard, something which provides the words, the visuals and any screen commands. This stage requires logical thinking. When my team was at its largest, with seven of us, I would say only 2 really were skilled at this stage. I’m always a believer in letting people try anything once, so it’s fair to say we had a few occasions where we learnt from our mistakes, that if the storyboard wasn’t right it would cause headaches and significant re-work if it was passed off to build too soon. It’s always tempting to rush jobs through when there’s a deadline, but it’s always a classic case of the more time you spend planning, the more smoothly the build stage is.

To be continued….