Jon,

Great post and thank you for bringing some benchmarks to the table.

The ASTD number look a bit off. It appears Limited Interactivity has a low that is higher than the Moderate Interactivity. It questions their accuracy. However, it's apparent that good rapid e-learning takes time.

I think the "rapid" part is more for awareness or knowledge dumps that's called training. There is nothing wrong with this and sometimes, that's all that's needed. But lets face it, there is nothing rapid about building a simulation where it is a matter of life and death – regardless of the tool that one uses.

Thanks for the benchmarks again. It helps us estimate our time and convince our clients just a little bit better.

Scott

Hi Scott, thanks for the additional contribution! I noticed the anomaly too and wondered about the data set and validity. I wonder though, if it is a function of skill with the tools, newbies (or SMEs) taking longer to create the lower-level content, and becoming more efficient as they transition into moderate. Overall, I think the best bet is to look at the trends which are surprisingly consistent over quite a period of time in the maturation of those tools.

jon

Kia ora e Jon!

I agree with all that you bring forward here.

The Hawthorne Effect is another that contributes to the delusion of (possible) success through (rapid) elearning. There is also the common culture that smacks so much of postmodernism, referred to in Shelley Gare's book, The Triumph of the Airheads . . .

I have lived and worked through the times you mentioned of proper storyboarding, user experience, and level of interactivity etc. What we are seeing being celebrated today is a delusion that "this is all that's needed".

Thanks Ken - well spoken and true to every word. Hmmm, maybe I should come down to discuss further - NZ is absolutely my favorite place on earth. Our dear friend and colleague, Wayne Hodgins is currently on his way there via Learnativity. You can read about his experiences in the recent tsunami and making his way toward your beautiful country here - http://learnativity.typepad.com/

[...] BONUS: Don’t let the term “Rapid E-learning” fool you.  While it is possible to build quality e-learning quickly, Jon Lloyd at VMG doesn’t believe so. He outlines why in his post, There’s nothing rapid about Rapid eLearning. [...]

Regardless of the data and as a matter of survival, we should not reject what's happening before our very eyes as less than effective. Using filters from the past can color what you see. I think Darwin can guide us in helping to evolve what we do for clients. What good does lamenting over old models do?

When the barbarians are at the gate, and the CLO and instructional design staff are gone, a bright, adminastrative staffer with Articulate can respond to the moment of need and push out simple training that tells you how to shoot the arrow.

We at CommLab India, a company that specializes in online custom courseware development for the past 9 years has a different experience. For a typical 1 hour of learning, we take about 4 weeks from creating storyboard to final production.

As far as Rapid elearning is concerned, it requires 3 things - one a clear process in place and - two - good and trained professionals - be it Instructional designers, graphic designers, programmers, quality etc. and three a library of reusable components, which will help reduce time and cost.

Excellent post, Jon. A point that I would like to add is that maybe we've got the development model all wrong. For example, should a typical company really have a large multimedia development team consisting of designers, storyboard teams, Flash developers, and creative artists? Instead, perhaps we should be upskilling our Subject Matter Experts in developing their own e-learning courseware? In the organizational sense, then, development is "rapid" because you have multiple people across the company publishing training solutions at any one time, with the support of qualified e-learning consultants of course.

Ryan - you are spot on! Glenn and I covered this in our "Do Less with Less" webinar a few weeks ago with TrainingIndustry.com (links to the "less with less" slides/recording are here http://bit.ly/ZNixl). When you have your 'manufacturing' process standardized, you can easily pull needed content into the plant and push into production. You might have to make a few adjustments to the 'assembly line' but by creating a templated approach, you can absolutely put the technology, the templates and the wrappers in the hands of the SMEs for their content production.

Another great blog post Jon. Enough said. You did a great job breaking down the complicated pieces. Interesting information. Looking forward for your next post.

Thanks Jon for sharing - got me thinking alot, especially the perspective you gave on the last 10 years, and the view from now if your just joining the field. Development of Serious Games and Immersive Learning Simulations appear to be following this same path.

For the last few years it has been big, multi disciplinary teams, using quite difficult and complex processes to deliver the immersive sim. Now, we have the advent of new tools just entering this field and eating away at this complexity. This is changing the development process to more agile and iterative approaches; enabling designers to do many of the other jobs; and introducing parallel workflows. Still, even with these tools and processes, to create something rich and effective requires 300 development hours per 'learning hour'. Its much faster and easier than before, buts its not going do be done over a weekend. I have also noticed that it demands greater levels of skill from the instructional designer - in the past they would be one person in a big team, now, they run the show; design, development and even project management.

Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post "No teme" in your blog with the link to you?