Examples of Award Winning Entries: Best Custom Content

As Brandon Hall calls for entries for 2009 awards, it lists examples of last year's winners of their site. You can view all examples on their site. Over the next few posts I will post my comments on the award winning entries. I start with Best Custom Content.

Best Custom Content

Watch approx 4 minute video of the award winning custom content. I like the introduction to the course, very emotional. Rest of the course is however just a regular elearning course with next and previous buttons and the regular suspects of controls, nothing that you haven't seen before if you've been in this industry long enough. The central portion of the screen presents the content in a series of narrated animation. The media presentation is, well, ordinary and standard. Nothing new in the interactivities either. So if you're expecting something new and brilliant, either in instructional design, strategy or just slick presentation, you'll be disappointed.

The Ultimate Question About Learning Content Development

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy introduces us to the story of the Ultimate Question about Life, The Universe and Everything. If there is such a question in training content development, it is How long does it take to create one hour of learning? Of course, it would be wonderful if the answer was as simple as 42. Bryan Chapman of Brandon Hall Research lists his findings based on various research reports by Brandon Hall. Read his full post here. Bryan lists the ratios for different types of learning.

Ratio for each Type of learning

34:1 Instructor-Led Training (ILT), including design, lesson plans, handouts, PowerPoint slides, etc.

33:1 PowerPoint to E-Learning Conversion. Not sure why it takes less time then creating ILT, but that's what we discovered when surveying 200 companies about this practice

220:1 Standard e-learning which includes presentation, audio, some video, test questions, and 20% interactivity

345:1 Time it takes for online learning publishers to design, create, test and package 3rd party courseware

750:1 Simulations from scratch. Creating highly interactive content

Clark Aldrich attempts to answer the question in terms of cost. How much does it cost the organizations to access an educational simulation.

Both questions in my mind are part of the ultimate question on learning and training content development. I am sure you've been asked this question many times. I surely have been, heck I have even set targets for my teams. Is there a single answer to this question? The research surely provides a ball park number to compare against. However there are too many variables, and what you achieve or wish to achieve may depend on many other parameters and business goals.

Who is the boss- QC or Client?

There are two types of courses created in elearning practices:

• Zero Defect courses from QC test but are entirely rejected from the client.
• Courses rejected at QC test plan, but are accepted by the client with minor concerns.

Which is a better situation than other? I am sure none of them is an ideal situation, but both are real and practical.

This generally happens with legacy clients and projects; the role of an instructional designer seems very restricted. Templates, standards related to graphics, language and QC are already established. For all good reasons neither the project team, nor the client is ready for change. In such cases, an ID can only innovate various techniques of introducing content, and assessments to achieve the defined objectives. For a content developer who is working on such projects for long , standards related to formatting, graphic and QC are not a big challenge. In most of the cases, these experienced content developers produce Zero Defect courses for QC testing.
I have seen such courses being entirely rejected from the client. Each rejected course from client is a bad experience left with the client and of course de-motivating for entire team working on it. I have also experienced that courses which get rejected at QC test plan, are accepted by the client with minor concerns.

This leads to two inter related questions –

How relevant and successful is the QC test plan?
In which situation, do you think the ID should be held responsible for the rejection?

While debating on these issues, I have come across two very strong opinions:

First opinion says ID in first situation should not be held responsible as his course has passed QC test with Zero defect. He had followed all the defined standards religiously.

The second opinion supports the ID in the second situation. ID should not be held for the QC defect. The ID has done complete justice with his role, in understanding content and designing assessments and activities as per the client’s expectations.It says that to follow defined standards is secondary if we compare it with the understanding and creating a course up to the client’s expectations. QC test plan is led out to define standards as basic general rules to maintain consistency across the entire project. Whereas, understanding the content for each new and different course and designing it to the client’s expectation is a bigger challenge and responsibility, which in this case has been handled successfully.

I am leaving this debate open to all, would like to know your interpretations and opinions, before I conclude.

Google Effectively

Before leaving Delhi, my friend presented me this book called The Google story. The book is about how Google came into existence and the fiery motivation of its consistent performance. Well, this is not the only high point of the book, I rather admired one of the three appendixes of the book that is Appendix I: Google Search Tips. It broadened my knowledge about Google, that Google is not only a search engine but, also has other day to day utility tools. It calculates, it converts – currency, speed, time, temperature, distance…I was amazed with the tools, tips, and tricks available at Google.

Since I was learning the utility of goggle, I googled for Google Search Tips and found Ultimate Google Guide. The blog was posted in Dec 2005; it is still very relevant and useful. I learnt various tips and tricks about googling effectively from this link. The link has list of tips on- Basic Operators, Advanced google operators, SEO-oriented Operators, Calculator Guide, and Conversions -with examples on conversion in degrees / in radians, in hex / in binary / in octal / in decimal, distance conversions, speed, time, temperature, currency etc.

There is more to share about Google. It is an eye opener that Google also provides tremendous help in acquiring and understanding content. Certainly, it is an important area for an Instruction Designer. No matter how good or bad is an SME or a Coursewriter, it is crucial for an ID to understand the content very well. None the less, it is equally crucial to learn and understand the content within the project timelines. Though nothing shall replace serious studying of prescribed text books, yet for a quick help following tips can be used:

· You can browse the world’s bookshelves online. Search for a topic at http://books.google.com/ and you will see information from actual books that Google has scanned and indexed in its database. You can browse or read the entire text of works that are not copy righted; for others you can see snippets and learn where to buy a full copy.

· Use link I’m Feeling lucky. Enter the search term and click this button on the Google homepage to bypass a long list of results. You can reach the top matching Web page for your term.

· You can use Cached version. Google tends to list popular and fresh pages at the top of its results, but dig beyond the first page or two of search results and you will often find older and forgotten pages but these are the ones what you need for your project. While searching for the Cached version of web pages, Google collects as it crawls and downloads the content you are seeking even if the current version of the pages has changed- say, a news site that removed the original story.

· The tip: the Cached version also highlights your search terms in colour wherever they appear on the page, an especially helpful feature when combing through long documents.

· For academic research purposes you may use http://scholar.google.co.in/. Serious searches can tap into thousands of scientific and academic journals with Google Scholars. Enter a query into search box at http://scholar.google.co.in/ to get abstracts and papers from published sources.

· Have more results onto each page: The Preferences link to the right of the search box is your ticket to tweaking various settings for Google searches, including the number of results displayed per page. Increase the number of matches you see per page from the number of matches you see per page from standard set of 10 to 20, 30 or more, to put more answers at your finger tips faster.

· You can translate at a single click. The language tool link, also found to the right of the search box on the homepage, calls up Google’s automated translation service as well as other language options. From this page, you can translate text among numerous languages (English to Spanish, French to German, Chinese to English…) or translate a Web page simply by entering its address.

· For further update, keep peeping inside Google. Click the “more>” link above the search box to find additional Google features and products as well as further tips how to search effectively. Check out the very handy one page Google search guide at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html·

The tip: see what the future Google innovation holds- including TV search, Personalized search, a real time taxicab locator and more - at Google labs. Just type Google labs into the Google search box.

Happy Goooooooooogling…