The Value of Good eLearning Developers
August 25, 2008
Recently I’ve been pushing our organization to focus on nurturing more in-house eLearning development skill versus frequently relying on outside vendors who give us mundane eLearning at outrageous prices. “We can do far better for far less!” I wail. Fortunately, my cries are finally being heard, and we now seem to be heading in the right direction. Albeit cautiously.
A few weeks ago I was having a spirited discussion with one of the training managers in our organization regarding this shift. While the discussion was mostly positive, she did make a comment regarding dedicating more staff to in-house development that alarmed me. The comment went something like this:
“Why would we pay someone X thousand dollars a year just to sit and do this [makes dismissive gesture of fingers typing on a keyboard] all day?”
[insert sound of needle scratching vinyl record here]
What???
OK, let me get this straight: eLearning is supposed to be this magical contraption that saves us a bajillion dollars in training costs, yet building this magical contraption is nothing more than a trivial clerical task that involves the simple press of a button and turn of a few dials? Seriously?
And if eLearning development is such a menial, low-grade task, why are we paying vendors high-grade dollars to do eLearning development for us? Someone please explain the logic here.
With this kind of attitude, it’s no wonder our eLearning is boring, mundane, unimaginative, and mightily resisted by the majority of our learners.
The biggest reason we are struggling with getting our learners to embrace the concept of eLearning is not that the concept of anytime, anywhere learning isn’t sound. The biggest reason is that we have chosen to represent this new way to learn with some of the most offensively bland products imaginable for the sake of a higher ROI. Can we not see how we are sabotaging ourselves here?
Personally, I fail to see how the value of a course developer who sits around a table with a bunch of SMEs to hash out the course content is of more monetary worth than the eLearning developer who has to step in and put that content into a compelling eLearning product. Who, by the way, needs to be an expert of Photoshop, Fireworks, visual design basics, typography, color, audio recording and editing, video recording and editing, PowerPoint, Flash, HTML, JavaScript, Captivate, Articulate, and on, and on, and on. Not to mention an efficient writer and grammarian whose task it is to clean up the often-jumbled mess the course writers/SMEs provide (particularly the almost-always horrible narration script).
Perhaps I should feel good knowing that my work is done so quickly and the quality of my product is so great that my eLearning-ignorant peers think the work involved is really no big deal. But, surprisingly, I suddenly don’t feel good about that. Not at all.
If we can’t convince the people with the budget that eLearning is only going to save us money if we put enough money into eLearning to create compelling learning experiences, then eLearning is surely doomed.
That, or I need to quit my job and get in on some of this overpriced big-dollar vendor-created eLearning action, while the getting is good.
So if you’re in a corporate training shop with a lack of in-house talent and you have big outsourcing dollars to wildly throw around…call me.
Posted in Rants, eLearning Design
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I'm an eLearning developer and presentation designer looking for (and striving to create) eLearning and presentations that delight as well as educate and inform. Please join me.
August 25th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Spot on Chris! The organization that most needs a talented e-learning designer/developer (or whatever we wish to call ourselves), is usually the one that doesn’t think there’s much value in training, let alone e-learning. It’s ironic. But if they knew they needed an effective e-learning solution for their problems, they would have already put it in place and have solved many of their problems. That’s what our job really is: solve business problems via the medium of e-learning.
If we do our job well, e-learning designers should not have difficulty keeping our positions in our organizations, and in fact, we should be climbing higher because of the value we bring to the organization. Good corporate training, which will include e-learning, solves business problems from front-line job training / job aids, to soft skills, to leadership development, to disaster planning, etc., the list goes on.
Don’t sweat the e-learning ignorant! Let them remain ignorant, while you help solve real business problems and provide value and make your organization better. (Tomorrow I’m meeting with a C-level Admin to cast a vision for my organization to adopt an “Educational Strategic Plan” - why? Because no one has suggested it before now! We have 1600 users in our system!)
August 27th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
THANK
YOU
!!!!
Seriously…!
September 1st, 2008 at 6:58 pm
It’s funny though…. those who dismiss developers with the “finger wiggle” have no problems paying the big bucks to the IT gurus who type all day, the finance people who sit at the keyboard all day, or the people in the C-level offices who can’t even do their own email! [What DO those people do all day?]
The fact is that there is dignity in ALL the work done in the organization, if the person doing it does it well, with integrity, and pride. My concern is not with the ignorant; it’s with those who accept such a dismissive attitude and take it as truth. I’ve worked in a variety of settings doing work analysis and with some exceptional SMEs who didn’t really appreciate their value simply because some “suit” treated them in a dismissive manner. I can recall way too many times when I’ve been dealing 1:1 with a talented person and heard them say something like “I’m just a …..(fill in the blank).” Whenever I hear that phrase, I know there person is discounting their value. If the job was not valuable, you wouldn’t have the job. One of the most exciting things I’ve done when working with such folks is to help them recognize the depth and breadth of their own expertise! You know the hallmarks of an expert: they do it fast, they do it almost automatically, they skip steps and can’t always explain how they decided what to do next, they think it’s easy, and they think anyone can do it. Same holds true for eLearning developers. A good one makes it look effortless — it’s a sign of expertise. Sometimes it’s useful to let the dismissive finger wiggler try to do it, just to get a taste of our reality. [dismissive finger wiggler is the technical term! ]