SharePoint for eLearning Course Design Collaboration

December 5, 2008

Earlier today on Tony Karrer’s excellent eLearning Technology blog, I commented in response to his post requesting examples of SharePoint use in eLearning development. I thought I’d share my comment here as well (with a little more elaboration), as some of you may be looking into collaborative development tools (or are unhappy with the tool you’re currently using).

For the past year, I’ve been spearheading the implementation of SharePoint for our organization’s course development work. Initially this was optional for our project managers (a “Here’s something cool if you’d like to try it!” offer), but it has proven so effective that it has now become our mandated course development project management platform. It works well (mostly) for our course development regardless of the delivery method (classroom, synchronous or asynchronous online, etc.) or authoring tool (Articulate, etc.).

Each course we develop has its own SharePoint site, with the project manager designated as that site’s Administrator. The project SMEs are added as Contributors, and in-business analysts who review and approve the material are added as Readers.

We have a site template we use for each course site featuring the page layout that has been the most effective for us. Each site also includes a link to a narrated SharePoint tutorial I created using Articulate Presenter – SMEs are required to view this tutorial when the project begins.

I’m trying to drive our project managers to rely on SharePoint for all course-related interaction, for example, using the Discussions feature on the SharePoint site rather than using email. This ensures all the information and communication related to the course development project remains neatly contained in one place, which makes it easy for later review/auditing or course revisions. With so many people retiring from the federal government, it’s important that we keep this data in a sharable format, and email just doesn’t cut it.

We’ve certainly felt some growing pains (and continue to do so), some approaching disastrous, but I don’t think any of our project managers would willingly go back to the “old way” of doing things now.

At a higher level, our corporate HQ folks are trying to decide if they should consolidate their course development interactions within their current development tool of choice (rhymes with “HorsePen,” ugh), which now features resource management functionality, or use SharePoint. Personally, I believe relying on something as proprietary as “HorsePen” would be a mistake – our authoring tools change with the tides, and locking everything up with a single vendor’s tool would be a mistake. And we all know from experience that many eLearning companies tend to be here one day and gone the next. Not that SharePoint isn’t proprietary, but it’s much more universal (and not limited to course development work), and Microsoft Office isn’t going anywhere anytime soon (for good or for bad).

If you’ve spent any time reading this blog at all, I’m sure you’ve noticed my thinly-veiled disdain for most Microsoft projects. And I speak not as an ignorant partisan, but as an experienced user of both Windows and Mac platforms for almost 20 years. So don’t assume that I’m endorsing SharePoint as Best In Class for collaborative work. Honestly, I don’t know how it stacks up against competitors’ tools. I will say that Microsoft’s placement of the Delete button directly beneath the Edit button in the document’s contextual menu is one of the greatest software user interface blunders I’ve ever seen (and a flaw that has caused us a few unintentionally-deleted documents and many tears). But we are currently using SharePoint 2003 (government IT likes to let our technology age like cheese or a fine wine before allowing us to taste it), and I believe Microsoft has corrected that gaffe in SharePoint 2007. I assume (hope) that many of the other bugs/flaws/incomprehensible error messages that afflict our folks in SharePoint 2003 have been resolved in SharePoint 2007. I can’t wait to find out – in about 2015, which is probably when my agency will upgrade to the 2007 package. Hey, we’re all about saving you, the taxpayer, a buck by sitting on crusty old technology as long as we possibly can, spending 10x those savings in lost efficiency, support headaches, user hostility, and technology-induced sick leave.

You may be aware that for online collaborative work, SharePoint is not the only game in town. But our IT department rules our agency with a Microsoft-branded iron glove, and we’re not at liberty to experiment with other offerings in many cases. If I were freed from these shackles, I would probably also explore other tools, such as Basecamp, among many others. Or perhaps an eLearning-specific collaboration environment, such as Unison from Rapid Intake, which I would love to experiment with and review, but alas, cannot (thank you again to the control freaks in our IT department). Though be advised that many of these tools come with the same concerns about longevity and proprietary lock-in I mentioned above.

If you’ve used any other collaborative tools, or have any SharePoint experiences you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them in the comments section.

Posted in eLearning Development Tools