I know, the title sounds a bit dramatic, doesn’t it? But Tom Kuhlmann (who writes Tom's Blog for Articulate users) tells an inspiring story of a piece of e-learning created over a weekend. Rapid e-learning, indeed. 

And it was rapid with good reason. The company producing it had several manufacturing facilities working 24/7. On this particular weekend, there was a serious accident at one of the facilities and an employee died. 

The safety team (of two) quickly got to work, creating pieces of content (including video footage), to highlight the sequence of events that led to the loss of life and remind people of the safety rules they needed to follow to avoid a recurrence. 

12 hours later, the site safety manager had pulled this all together into a piece of refresher e-learning, distributed to all manufacturing facilities across the company. 

Imagine how long that could've taken with the involvement of a large, corporate e-learning development team?

The final output from the site safety manager may not have been perfect, but it met the organisation's needs at a critical moment.

This story brings home a hugely important point it's easy to forget - especially if you work in a large organisation

Organisations are not interested in creating a piece of e-learning, per se, but in meeting a specific organisational goal. E-learning is simply one way of helping achieve that goal. 

So at the very start of your e-learning development process, it's always a good idea to step away from the solution and focus on the organisational goal. This gives you the opportunity to assess the best learning solution to meet the goal. 

This simple assessment can potentially save you many hours of wasted effort and many thousands of pounds of mis-directed budget.  Use your resources as and when appropriate. Not all pieces of learning need to be created equal!

If you need help with designing your e-learning, check out our e-learning design options.