Chapter 6. Learning materials

Learning plays a critical role in most organizations. A workforce that’s highly trained is productive and effective; it can adapt to changing market and customer requirements. Many organizations have their own learning development (LD) teams and may also bring in training expertise from outside the organization. Some even use their LD teams as cost centers and hire them out to customize content for customers.

Instructional designers (IDs) are highly skilled at creating learning materials that specifically meet the learner’s needs. However, on a tight budget and even tighter timeline, they’re hard-pressed to provide multiple types of training materials for multiple learners.

Learning development teams are no strangers to the concept of modular reusable content. In 1997, Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) began working on a reference model that defined reusable learning content. This model is known as SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model). SCORM is a collection of standards for eLearning materials that facilitates the delivery of eLearning through a learning management system (LMS). Most authoring tools and learning content management systems (LCMS) are SCORM-compliant. However, while SCORM makes it possible to reuse learning modules in a variety of different learning delivery tools, it doesn’t truly promote the concept of reusable learning content.

Types of learning materials

Learning development teams develop a wide range of learning materials, and each type of learning poses its own challenges.

Instructor-led training (ILT)

Instructor-led training is still a dominant form of training. Organizations and participants like the face-to-face interaction and the ability to work closely with an instructor. Participants also learn from other participants. Classroom training is typically supported by instructor-led materials and participant materials. The primary vehicle of delivery is the instructor, accompanied by PowerPoint slides and possibly some video.

ILT does, though, pose a number of challenges:

• Synchronization of handouts and slides

Instructors love to have thumbnail images of the slides in their materials to guide them in their presentation. However, creating a slide, then creating a thumbnail and including it in the instructor’s guide takes a lot of manual work. And when the slide changes, the instructor guide needs to change too.

Some organizations have stopped putting in the thumbnail and instead reference the slide number. But that also presents a problem when the content is reorganized and the slides no longer fall in their original order. So it’s a huge manual task to keep the slides and handouts synchronized.

• Synchronization of instructor materials and participant materials

Instructors like to know what information the participant is getting, and then be guided in what they should do with that information (for example, explain a concept, demonstrate something, or conduct an exercise). Some organizations have created their materials in a two-page-spread format so that the left side of the page contains the instructor materials while the right side contains the participant materials. However, this design again requires a tremendous amount of manual work to create and maintain, and for this reason many organizations have abandoned this format.

• Customization

Content often needs to be customized to meet specific learner needs. Instructors can perform minor customizations on the fly by changing what they say while, or after, they display a slide or other learning asset. In many cases, however, customization requires actually changing the materials themselves.

Sometimes the changes may be as simple as reorganizing the content, but often, terminology and exercises must be changed too. It’s very difficult to customize the materials and still keep these materials synchronized with the standard materials for future updates. Ensuring that customized and standard materials remain synchronized becomes a tedious, error-prone manual process when content is locked in print layouts and when the current toolset doesn’t facilitate the creation and management of customized content.

• Cost of travel

Although both trainers and participants generally appreciate the immediacy of ILT, there’s one group of people who isn’t enamored of the process: accountants.

Classroom training is becoming harder to justify for some as companies have become more global and the cost of travel and accommodation to bring learners to the training has skyrocketed. It simply isn’t always feasible to move employees to training; training has to come to the learner.

Virtual classroom training

Virtual classroom training has become popular in recent years. Virtual classroom training can be as simple as web-based, instructor-led sessions with traditional PowerPoint slides, or it can be more elaborate, with whiteboard sharing, breakout sessions, and collaboration among students.

Virtual classroom training also poses certain challenges:

• Creation of materials

Creating materials for the instructor and the participants presents problems similar to those associated with producing ILT training materials.

• Management of materials

Virtual classroom software is designed for learning to be shared in a virtual classroom. The software often provides a method for uploading learning assets (PowerPoint slides, videos, and so on) but there’s no way to actually manage the materials once they are loaded. There’s also no way to tell what the most current version of the asset is or even where to find it. Virtual classroom software provides very rudimentary search and retrieval capabilities. Once an organization starts to use the virtual classroom extensively, they lose the ability to keep track of the content.

• Instructor availability

Despite the fact that this type of training can reach more learners in many different locations, the amount of delivery is still constrained by the availability of instructors, and the fact that there are only so many hours in a day for delivery. Some companies record the presentation so that others can watch it in the future, but these secondary learners lose the live interaction, the collaboration with other participants, and the ability to ask questions. Just listening to sessions can be pretty boring, and learners may lose interest.

eLearning

Many organizations have moved away from classroom-based learning to eLearning. eLearning provides web-based training for self-paced learning. eLearning can be as basic as a “page turner,” where content is presented on a screen and the learner clicks the next button to read through the materials, or as high-end as learning with simulations and virtual worlds. Most eLearning offers medium-level interactivity, with some page turning plus video, audio, interactive exercises, and quizzes.

eLearning involves its own challenges:

• Cost

The biggest issue with eLearning is its cost. It can be significantly more expensive to design medium or high-end learning materials.

Early proponents of eLearning touted it as a way to combine the immediacy and interactivity of ILT with the low cost of web delivery (compared with the cost of an instructor). But it turns out that “replacing the instructor” is not as easy or inexpensive as it first seemed. To understand what the learners need, to anticipate all the interactivity required at any point in the learning cycle, and then to design and create all the learning assets (text, audio, or video) is very difficult and expensive.

Although costs can vary, the typical cost of developing ILT is about 30 hours of development for one hour of instruction. Compare that to eLearning, which often takes 100 hours of development for one hour of basic eLearning, 200 hours of development for medium-level interactivity, and 300 hours of development for high-end eLearning. We’ve known some high-end eLearning to cost millions of dollars. Unless you have a lot of learners, these costs may simply not be justifiable.

• Customization and localization

The higher the level of eLearning, the more expensive it is to customize. Simulations, videos, and other interactive materials tend to be created as a single “chunk” of content. It isn’t easy to switch out language or images, or change interactivity, without redoing the entire set of materials.

• Bandwidth

If you’re accustomed to a high-speed Internet connection, you take it for granted. It’s only when you don’t have high-speed access for some reason that you realize how important it is. High-end eLearning requires very fast Internet speeds with good throughput. If your learners are in a location where they don’t have reliable high-speed access, then high-end eLearning might not be an option. In most cases the files are designed to be streamed (viewed in real time over the Web) rather than downloaded. If the content is being handled by a local server, it may not be too much of a problem, but eLearning that’s located on a geographically different server can become unusable because of slow performance issues.

Mobile

Learning has moved from the classroom to the desktop and now to mobile. With mobile, learners can learn wherever they are. Learning materials can be delivered in bite-sized pieces to enable learning whenever people have some downtime, such as in lineups, on the commuter train, or between other activities.

Learning via mobile (mLearning) is still in the early adoption stage but growing quickly. A recent survey of their membership conducted by the eLearning Guild¹ found the following:

• 25.5 percent were engaged in producing mLearning

• 40 percent were exploring mLearning

• 51 percent had seen a positive return on investment (ROI), while another 38.8 percent said it was too early to tell

• 47.4 percent intended to do more mLearning in the next year

In another report, Ambient Insight Research determined that the mobile learning market is growing at a rate of 18.3 percent annually; revenues reached $632.2 million in 2009 and will top $1.4 billion by 2014.²

Mobile learning involves the following challenges:

• mLearning versus eLearning

Mobile’s ease of access and the short time periods people typically spend on it are better suited to performance support than to full-scale learning. Typical examples of mobile performance support include job aids, checklists, and access to information we can’t easily remember (for example, numbers and details). Mobile can capture activity and provide unique responses based on customer selections.

• Content conversion

Learning content developed for classrooms, virtual classrooms, or eLearning doesn’t convert well to mobile. Learning materials developed for one channel aren’t designed to adapt to another. As in other industries, content is tied to format and delivery channels, making it difficult to convert. However, more importantly, content for other learning channels isn’t optimized for the unique environment of a mobile device (for example, small screen; short, rapid usage; and lack of integration with enterprise tools).

• Proliferation of devices

Mobile content has no equivalent to the eBook EPUB standard. There’s no single across multiple mobile platforms; material developed for the Android won’t work on iOS (Apple), and material developed for webOS won’t run on Windows Phone 7. This means that mLearning materials have to be recoded to run on each device platform.

In addition, the differing capabilities of devices running the same operating system, such as Apple’s iOS, are significant—consider the differences between an iPhone and an iPad. What works on one may not work on the other. The combinations of operating system and hardware capabilities mean that the mobile training market is highly fragmented.

• Lack of Adobe Flash

A lot of learning materials have been built using Adobe Flash. Many devices, notably Apple’s iOS-based devices such as iPhones and iPads, don’t run Flash. Adobe has ceased the development of Flash for mobile devices. It will be replaced by HTML5-based interactivity. This will require the conversion of existing Flash materials.

• Security

Organizations are often concerned about the security of their content. Passwords and wiping of stored information can help, but many are concerned about the information being accessed en route.

The role of a unified content strategy

Learning development teams must free themselves from thinking in deliverables (ILT, PowerPoint presentation, eLearning, and mLearning) and think instead in terms of modular reusable content. Some organizations already employ reusable learning objects (RLOs), but the objects are still tied to a particular format. It’s time to start thinking about content separate from format and channel. Learning development teams need to adopt a unified content strategy that bridges channels and learning types to deliver just-in-time learning and support for learners wherever they are and on whatever device they’re using.

A unified content strategy facilitates learning in these ways:

• Content relationships can be updated when a related component is updated to aid in the synchronization of content.

• Modular RLOs (content) can be mixed and matched to create custom learning experiences.

• Content can be tagged with metadata (for example, Instructor, Objective, Quiz, Concept, and Support) to facilitate the automated assembly and delivery of content.

Summary

Learning plays a critical role in most organizations. IDs are highly skilled at creating learning materials that specifically meet the learner’s needs. Learning development teams produce a number of different types of learning materials, including instructor-led training, virtual classroom training, eLearning, and most recently mLearning. However, they’re hard-pressed to provide multiple types of training materials for multiple learners on a tight budget and an even tighter timeline.

A unified content strategy can help in the development of learning materials through the use of:

• Modular RLOs (content) that can be mixed and matched to create custom learning experiences and assemblies of different types of learning materials and delivered to different channels.

• Format-free content that can be adapted and delivered to multiple devices.