Building a Team for Digital L&D - Part 2 - What Skills?

We're probably all aware that there's good and bad e-learning out there. We're also probably all aware that designing an e-learning course is not the same as designing a classroom course. Whilst up-skilling my L&D team, we recognised that to learn more we needed to bring in someone that knew more than us. We worked with a couple of consultants and they helped us to break-down and analyse the different roles that are needed in the design and build of effective e-learning content. We had begun to work this out for ourselves, sometimes the hard way by getting it wrong. Building e-learning content is more akin to a software development project than designing a classroom training course. A clear plan is needed with project mile-stones, and make sure you have it all signed off before you start to build. But that is getting into the detail. We identified there were key roles required. These include the below:

Leadership:

Project Manager

Content Development:

Subject Matter expert

Instructional designer/writer

Copy editor

Peer reviewer

E-learning developer

Media:

Script preparer

Photographer / videographer

Voice artist

Graphic Designer

QA:

Functional Tester

Customer reviewer

 Of course some of these overlap, or could be carried out by the same person, but assuming everyone had the skill or aptitude to do them effectively was wrong. My advice would be to get to know your team members and test them out gently on each area if you don't already know where there strengths lie. And I would play to their strengths. This isn't a time to worry about status, role or position power. If someone is creative and good with ideas get them involved at the outset with concepts or early story boarding as part of the Instructional design role. If someone is good with words have them work on the script. If someone else has a good logical brain they would be good at a detailed storyboard. More is better than less, and always having multiple people involved at each stage can ensure a better end product. Make sure the team are 'mature' eg stable enough in their relationships with each other that difficult conversations can be had. The team need to have moved through their forming phase, and although storming can be uncomfortable it is necessary.

The above role list can also be simplified, for example if you don’t need custom graphics or photography then the media stage can be reduced to someone to work on the script and some support from a graphic designer. If those extra specialist skills are needed, these elements can be outsourced.

When our team was at its busiest with producing e-learning content we would have a weekly meeting to review all of our projects, review any content together and collectively peer assess.

It is imperative that training is given to your traditional L&D team, as these are all fairly unique skills. Our team all had a day’s training in Instructional Design, as well as the Authorware users having training in their particular tools. It’s important to note that Authorware companies will focus their training on using their products, and not necessarily the science of good e-learning design itself. Some products have extensive on-line resources and communities (check out Articulate’s E-learning Heroes).

For me one of the areas I was quite passionate about was the actual scripting. Anyone that has spent anytime working with e-learning knows that when looking on a screen, less is more. There is an art to shrinking down the words used to key information. Here I was grateful for the many occasions I have attended and delivered training around effective writing skills, and from my team I acquired the nickname ‘Red-pen Rachel’…

So some really effective writing skills training will help hone the skills needed (I can recommend The Writer for good all-round writing training). It is interesting to note however that scripting for e-learning is not like writing for any other genre, so going to a traditional copy-writer may not yield the correct results.

Next time we’ll get more into the actual process and its various stages….