If you are an L&D manager or L&D team member, you’ll probably get bombarded with requests for training week in and week out.

If your L&D function is well-positioned and well-respected, then you’ll almost certainly be in a position to do some analysis before you simply acquiesce to the training request ‘as is’.

And there’s a good reason for wanting to be in the position to do that analysis. Because in many cases when a request for training is received, a little digging reveals that a new piece of training is not the solution at all.

Here's an interesting situation that we encountered quite a while ago that neatly illustrates the point. 

An airline wanted some e-learning to cover pre-flight safety checks and procedures for its cabin crew. They wanted the e-learning to be engaging, they said.

A little digging in the early stages of the project revealed the following.

The checks and procedures were slightly different for each type of plane the airline used. As cabin crew would fly on a variety of planes and might not be on a particular model of plane for several months at a time, it was unlikely they’d recall all the variations without a prompt. 

Nothing in the checks or procedures was particularly complicated. Everything the cabin crew needed to know and do was clearly and throughly documented already in a paper-based manual. They were supposed to carry this with them whenever they were on a flight.

Turns out many of them didn't. It was heavy. People didn't like carrying it. Some supervisors had stopped carrying theirs. So subordinates took their cue from their supervisors and stopped carrying theirs, too.

Over time, with no manual to refer to and to jog their memory, the checks and procedures were being carried out from memory and were not always being completed fully or accurately. 

The procedures within the existing manual were clear, concise and easy to follow. But the existing means of delivery (a big heavy manual) was clearly not working. However, the proposed solution was not much better. Starting up a laptop or tablet, firing up an e-learning programme and navigating to the correct place in the course to find the information you needed is hardly a frictionless approach.

In reality, this was a performance support issue. The solution lay in finding the simplest and least cumbersome way to provide those existing procedure steps to the cabin crew, in the moment of need.

Not all e-learning is created equal, that's for sure. If you are a 'big guy' with a team of designers and developers and a fairly sizeable budget, the e-learning you produce will look markedly different from the courses produced by a team of two with an authoring tool and not much else.

If you're the team of two (and that's much more typical that you'd imagine), it might not feel ideal. But, in fact, with good instructional design approaches, the team of two are just as capable of producing really effective e-learning as the big guy.

(And let's not forget, the big guys get so distracted by all the clever things they can do, they frequently end up creating a flashy looking course that seems impressive, but is largely ineffective).

Regardless of your available resources or the size of your team, the most important question for everyone developing e-learning - what are you wanting to achieve with your course?

Once again, not all courses are created equal. If you need to make a big difference to some aspect of your organisation's performance, the kind of course you create will need to be different from the one that is just updating people on changes to their working conditions.

The former is about changing behaviour and thinking. The latter is about sharing information. Which brings us to that all-important distinction that many e-learning courses fail to make: inform or perform.

It seems like a simple enough distinction but it's one that, in my experience, is largely forgotten or side-stepped. And there's good reason for this. Because if your e-learning really, truly needs to focus on perform, it raises a whole host of difficulties. 

Creating perform e-learning is a real challenge. Thinking of ways to develop practice activities that move beyond predictable multiple-choice and true-false questions is hard. Especially hard with a basic authoring tool - but still problematic even with a high-end one

And if your development tool really is basic, your budget and resources really limited and your timelines ridiculously short, then the challenge you face is even greater still.

No surprise then that many people just throw in the towel at this point and go the conventional route - creating boring slides of content with a few tests and quizzes added along the way.

If you then throw into the mix, subject matter experts with no previous experience of developing e-learning, deathly dull, page-turners are almost inevitable.

A conventional approach might tick some boxes somewhere and satisfy the bean counters, but it's pretty much a disaster for the learners. Time and again, they are desperately in need of a course which helps them improve their performance, but they end up with something that just gives them lots of information. 

So when you know your focus needs to be on perform, but you are tempted to just inform, you really need some kind of instructional design framework to guide you through. 

A simple framework can shift you away from the default  present-then-test approach that most people take and that most authoring tools push you towards. It can focus you in a different, more task-focused direction. 

Even if you are stuck with a very basic authoring tool, an instructional design framework can help you think imaginatively about how to harness the capabilities of your authoring tool to create more authentic, job-realistic practice activities.

An instructional design framework isn't like a magic wand that you can wave at your content and your learners to miraculously solve all your e-learning problems. Applying a framework successfully requires some effort. You'll be finding ways to balance the needs of the learners against the limitations of your authoring tool, your own skills and available resources. 

You'll almost certainly pursue a few ideas that lead nowhere. And you'll probably experience a few false 'eureka' moments. But it's almost always worth it. Because in the end, the result is a more-effective, more learner-centred approach. 

If you'd like to find out more about a simple but highly effective instructional design framework you can apply to your e-learning, a great starting point is our on-demand webinar called Re-Frame Your E-Learning to Increase Workplace Impact and Performance.

You might not be 10,000 miles away in the jungle. But maybe you feel like you've just been landed with your very own training version of a bush tucker trial.

The one where they call you into their office and tell you the 'good' news. The news that starting next month, they're going to begin moving some of your training courses to e-learning.

And the 'even better' news? They won't be making you redundant, but they will be expecting you to systematically turn your classroom courses into e-learning ones.

And probably after that, you didn't hear much else. All the corporate L&D speak about the benefits, the technology and the systems. All just background noise, as your heart pounded and your head throbbed and you broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about the prospect of suddenly becoming an e-learning designer.

When you are faced with a 360 shift in your world like that one, what do you do? Where do you begin? 

Without question, you have to think differently. A new start. A new paradigm. Trying to take the classroom skills you've honed for years and graft them onto a computer screen simply won't work. And in your heart of hearts you know this.

You've sat in front of those deathly dull e-learning courses that page turn their way like a user manual. The ones where they sometimes have you dragging things pointlessly across the screen. And set you insultingly stupid quizzes and tests every 10th screen. 

So where do you start? To begin with forget about content. Sounds crazy, but it's not. You must shift from thinking about content first to thinking about context first. This is your new starting point. Where your learners are at. Their reality. Their environment. 

This is the key shift in your thinking that will grab their attention. This is the key shift in your approach that will draw them in. This is the key shift in your learning design that will help them practice and retain new knowledge and skills.

This is the shift that will break you free of the boring e-learning so many of us have been subjected to, for far too long.

Need some help with the transition to designing for e-learning or remote learning? Take a look at our instructional design training options.

In our most recent post, we looked at the pros and cons of outsourcing your e-learning development. In this post, we take a look at the pros and cons of keeping your development in-house...

Internal development: Pros

Total control over development

Unlike an outsourced team, you will have complete control over an in-house team and can manage the development process to a much greater degree, if you desire.

Organisational culture, content and processes

Members of an in-house team (assuming time served in the organisation) will have a much deeper understanding of all aspects of the organisation's culture, content and processes.

Less need for SME involvement 

Building on the previous point, you may not need to involve SMEs at all.

Internal development: Cons

Hiring and training team members

If you are creating a team from scratch or building on a small existing team, the time and costs involved in hiring new people, getting them trained and ready to go can be huge.

Team members leave 

Even with a good team in place, people can leave, go sick or otherwise leave you in the lurch just at a critical moment in the development process. You might find yourself repeating some of the activities and spending just outlined in the previous point.

Buying development software

As well as the cost of hiring and training, new software will have to be assessed, selected and bought. More time and money.

Speed of development

It may be that a small team simply can't go as fast as you would like, whereas an external supplier can scale a development team up or down according to need.

Keeping team members fully occupied

On a similar point, if you are spending money to create a new team, will there be a sufficient supply of work to keep them occupied and to justify the cost of hiring and training?

If you are just getting started with e-learning or thinking about using e-learning for the first time, check out our E-Learning Getting Started Guide.

There is never a one-size-fits-all solution to the question of whether to develop e-learning content in-house or to outsource to a third party.

If you are looking at moving over to a predominantly e-learning delivery model or you have experimented with e-learning delivery and now wish to ramp up development levels significantly, it's likely that investing time and money in getting the right software and creating your own in-house development time would be well worth your while.

However, for scenarios where you are just starting out with e-learning or you know you will only need limited amounts of content created on an ad hoc basis, you may well be better off outsourcing your production.

Either way, here are some of the pros and cons of outsourcing vs internal development:

Outsourcing development: Pros

Easy getting started

Although you will have to spend some time up front preparing a brief and communicating this to your chosen supplier, once this has been done and a timescale for development agreed, the project pretty much gets started without much fuss and bother

Minimal time and involvement 

Although you will clearly need to be involved and available, the project will effectively be run by one of the supplier's project managers. Your main involvement will be to review and request changes and liaise regularly to make sure all is going to plan.

Rapid development time

If you are in need of a speedy turn around, an external supplier can usually scale up their development team to meet a tighter deadline.

Scalable expert teams

Instructional designers, content writers, developers and designers are all involved at some point in the development of a piece of e-learning. An external supplier will have all these skilled resources readily available. 

Last minute changes

Although good planning should minimise the need for last-minute changes to content and interactivity, if they are necessary, an external supplier is likely to be better equipped to provide any additional skills or software that might be required.

Outsourcing development: Cons

Development costs

Under a supplier arrangement, you might ultimately reach a point where you had spent more money paying the supplier than if you had done the work in-house.

Potential for disappointing results

At the point you give a contract to a supplier, you will be confident in their ability to do the job. There is, however, always potential for disappointment. Perhaps things don't quite work out as expected or the quality  of the work is not quite up to standard.

Less control over development team

While a clear advantage of outsourcing is that you don't have to be so involved, if you are the kind of person who likes to micro-manage down to the last detail, this will undoubtedly  cause you frustration because you won't be able to do this to the same degree with an outsourced team.

Preparing a project brief

You will need to spend some time in the early stages creating a clear brief that is easily communicated to your supplier. However, it is likely you would need to do this with your in-house team, too.

Subject Matter Experts availability

Depending on the the kind of content being developed, your supplier may need frequent access to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in your organisation to understand or clarify specific aspects of that content.

If you are thinking about outsourcing your e-learning, why not take a look at our Effective E-Learning Project Pack to get a clearer idea of what might be involved when working with a supplier like Pacific Blue.

Now, here's an interesting point that came up on one of our instructional design programmes recently. Is using animation in e-learning really effective? 

A good question. It's time-consuming to produce and depending on the length and sophistication of said animation, it may not come cheap. So should you bother? 

While I’d always counsel caution when it comes to looking at research, there are a couple of interesting studies done on this. One by Narayanan and Hegarty and the other by Mayer, Mathias and Werzell. 

In each study, two sets of learners were given identical lessons explaining a process - with one difference. One lesson showed the process using an animation and one showed the process using a sequence of still diagrams. At the end of the lesson each set of learners took the same test. 

What is so very interesting about this is the test results in both studies: no significant difference between the two sets of learners. In other words, the use of an animation didn't have any major impact on the effectiveness of the learning. 

Can we extrapolate out from that and say animations make no significant difference whatever the subject matter? That's probably a bit of a stretch. 

What we can say with some certainty, however, is that if your aim is to teach someone a process, spending a lot of money on creating an animated version of that process certainly doesn’t guarantee a significantly better learning outcome. 

However, what I find most interesting is that there was no significant difference between using still and animated visuals. This is not a case of saying, ‘don’t bother with well-designed and integrated graphical presentation’. 

What it does seem to be saying is that super-charging that graphical presentation, by animating it, won’t actually make a significant difference. 

When we talk about e-learning we can all get carried away with talk of making it engaging; and animations are one way we might choose to achieve that engagement. 

It’s always worth remembering that spending big on additional multimedia bells and whistles won’t necessarily have the positive impact on learning outcomes that we might wish for.

If you are looking for help with designing and/or developing a piece of e-learning that only uses multimedia when it really counts, check out our service options.

A current societal obsession is the need for choice. More choice, we are told,  is automatically better. Sometimes true but not necessarily always. 

In the case of blended learning this is sometimes distilled into a focus on simply providing a variety of delivery mediums. This focus is often driven by the belief that because some learners learn better through different mediums, the same piece of content or learning must, therefore, be available in all possible mediums. 

A noble approach. But one that will keep you duplicating content for ever and a day. And which usually  ends up being an unsustainable burden. An unfortunate one, too.  Because there's a whole body of research which has established that, broadly speaking, as long as the learning is instructionally sound, the delivery medium makes little difference to the overall learning outcome.

This research was carried out before people were really taking account of any accessibility needs, so that is one factor that could definitely change the overall picture.

But in most cases, the ability to choose from a menu of delivery mediums will probably not make that much difference to the learning outcome.

Better to be thinking about providing a well-thought through programme of learning that gets results. A programme that looks at what needs to be taught and identifies the most pragmatic medium for delivery for  a particular part of that programme.

For example, core elements of a given piece of learning might benefit from classroom delivery, but beyond that other delivery channels might be better. For a refresher session, a virtual classroom or webinar-style session might be the perfect delivery medium. For complex skills where only a subset of the total  is used each time, short, highly-focused videos available at the point of need might be a suitable option.

Working all this out isn’t necessarily easy, which is why we have developed our Frequency, Complexity and Shelf-Life Matrix to help take some of the guesswork out of these decisions.

The key point. It is learning needs, aligned with the complexity, frequency and longevity of content that should guide the blend of delivery channels you choose.

If you are grappling with instructional design for a particular delivery medium or creating an effective blend, take a look at our in-house and publicly scheduled instructional design training.