One of the first steps in developing a new e-Learning program is to analyze the audience for your courses. In this article, I cover a series of questions in the form of decision trees to help you consider some specific characteristics of your audience that may affect your choice of tools, instructional techniques, and technologies. This is not an exhaustive list; however, it may be a somewhat different approach than you have previously encountered.
Many different elements may comprise an e-Learning course, ranging from live instructor-led Web conferences to completely self-contained, self-paced courses that are accessible through a learning management system. The tools and techniques that you choose to use in delivering your courses contribute to the difference between success and failure of your e-Learning program because of their effectiveness, appeal to your audience, and cost.
For the purposes of this article, I divide e-Learning courses into two categories: Instructor-led courses, and self-paced courses. I present decision trees to select between these alternative methods for your e-Learning programs. I realize that this is an over simplification of the choices currently available; however, I hope that this approach will give you some ideas that you might not have previously considered. If you are just starting out in e-Learning, the decision trees presented here might help you determine which type of courses you should try first: self-contained, self-paced programs or "live" courses that are cheaper and faster to develop, or some mix of the two.
Many people equate e-Learning with fully programmed, self-contained courses delivered through a learning management system on the Internet. This concept implies lots of instructional design, subject matter consultation, writing, programming, testing, review, and revisions to arrive at a product that you can finally offer to your learners. However, creating online courses doesn't mean that you have to spend a bundle on course development or hosting or both. There are many tools available to deliver courses using Internet technology, including live interaction with experts, that don't require a lot of up-front development.
Background
I initially developed the decision trees described in this article based on my experience with a non-profit professional association. Our continuing-education department offered many in-person courses that generated net revenue for the association, in addition to providing a valuable service to our professional community. When we first got into e-Learning (starting with course development in 1996), our goals were to achieve the same status with our new online programs, while expanding our audience to reach people who might never attend an in-person course.
Because of many years of experience offering in-person programs, we knew the demographics of the audience very well: Highly educated research scientists, primarily located in North America, working in industrial research centers. We also knew that most of the learners were around 40 years of age, at a mid-point in their careers. We hoped to increase the proportion of learners in their 20s and 30s, and to reach a more geographically dispersed audience.
We initially experimented with several self-paced courses based on our most popular in-person courses. We tried a wide variety of Internet tools and technologies in addition to text and static graphics, including online videos, multimedia interactions, quizzes, and tests. The small development teams included at least one subject matter expert, an editor/instructional designer, and a Web developer/designer. In some cases, one person served as the editor, instructional designer, and Web developer. Even with these small teams, the self-paced courses were relatively expensive to produce, because they required a great deal of rewriting, creation of Web-deliverable materials, review, and revision. We also needed to host these courses in a learning management system (LMS) in order to track the results of quizzes and tests, and the level of participation of the learners. Unfortunately, none of them ever attained a large enough audience to fully pay for the development costs, even over more than five years of offering them.
We also experimented with "live" interactive courses that were relatively inexpensive to produce. These required even smaller development teams: a subject matter expert and a staff person to handle editing, coaching of the instructors, administrative, and technical details. The time to develop each course was minimal, as most instructors could use pre-existing materials with a little adaptation. The live courses, which included a great deal of direct real-time interaction with the instructors, each included a series of Web conferences to take the place of classroom contact. We delivered course notes to students via a Website for each course. We pre-recorded some lecture-style presentations, and posted them to each course Website. In addition, some instructors included homework assignments that they either presented during the Web conference sessions, or submitted electronically and the instructor discussed them during the Web conferences.
Eventually, we also recorded each class session, and made the recordings available until about one month past the end of each course for learners who missed a session or wanted to review the discussion after a session. We tried several Web conference vendors as this program progressed, and eventually settled on WebEx for several years. We also gradually shifted from using an LMS to using a low-cost Web hosting service that allowed us to create password-protected pages for delivering the course materials and providing access to the recorded sessions. These courses quickly became popular, and within about three years were fully covering their production and presentation costs.
Self-paced or instructor-led?
During the years that we were developing and experimenting with our e-Learning program, I regularly met with a group of association educators who were also struggling to develop e-Learning programs within their associations. (We called ourselves the DC Distance Learning Coalition.) Each of us was finding success and failure with widely varying models for production and delivery of online education. Some were having great success offering the kind of self-paced courses in which we had been unsuccessful. However, others had a similar experience to ours with self-paced, self-contained courses.
I was puzzled about the reasons that would explain why such differing course models worked for different organizations. After thinking about the characteristics of the organizations, their learners, and the subject matter, I developed the decision tree shown in Figure 1.
This series of questions focuses on characteristics of the target audience. The first question relates to the motivation of the learners to take your courses in the first place. “Does the target audience require certification, licensure, or continuing education?”
The associations that seemed to have the most success with self-paced courses were targeting an audience that required some type of professional license or certification to engage in their work, such as nurses, lawyers, and people in several construction-related occupations.
The organizations that were not successful with self-paced courses had learners who did not require professional certification, like the scientists that we were trying to reach. Our learners’ motivation was the need to keep up with technology, and other information, in order to stay competitive in their fields and to maintain their abilities to create new products and services to be marketed by themselves or their employers.
If the answer is yes to the first question in the decision tree – the audience requires licensure or certification – the next question to ask is: “Is there either a large audience for the program, a small audience willing to pay a large amount, or a sponsor?”
The adjectives “large” and “small” are definitely subjective. You need to know the production and delivery costs of the e-Learning program to define large and small in your context. For example, if a course costs $20,000 to produce and deliver, then a large audience might be 100 or 1,000 people, making the amortized cost $200 per person or $20 per person respectively. A small audience would be 10 people, where the cost per person would be $2,000.
So, if you could reasonably expect 100 or more people to pay $200 each for your course or 1000 people to pay $20 each, then your audience would be large enough to support it. If only 10 people would be willing to pay the $200 or higher fee, then your audience is too small. Of course, if a sponsor is footing all or almost all of the expenses, then your audience size might not matter so much to you, although the sponsor will certainly still be concerned about it.
In our case, the fees for our self-paced courses ranged from a low of about $25 per person to a high of around $350 per person depending on the length of the course and the nature of its contents. We thought that our audience for each course would be a few hundred, up to 1000 people over a period of three or four years, which would have been more than sufficient to cover the production costs. This assumption turned out to be incorrect, and our audiences for these courses were too small to support them.
On the other hand, the associations that were targeting professionals who needed licensing or certification were finding learners in sufficient numbers who were willing to pay high enough fees to support their e-Learning programs. Apparently, the self-paced programs had a high value for these learners, because the courses directly related to their ability to continue working, and the convenience of not having a fixed schedule was appealing to them.
Therefore, if your answer to the second question is “Yes,” then you would probably be justified in planning an online exam or testing service, using self-paced online courses, or both.
In my experience, if you answered “No” to the first question, your answer to the second question would also be “No.” That is why I have structured the decision tree to skip the second question, if your first answer was “No.”
A “No” answer to the first or the second question leads to the conclusion that you should begin your e-Learning program with live, instructor-led courses that require less development time and cost than comparable self-paced courses.
You could also start with instructor-led courses if you were targeting licensed professionals; however, if you have a very large audience numbering in the hundreds or thousands, then the relative cost of delivering instructor-led programs might actually be higher than the self-paced courses.
We also found that our audience was willing to pay a much higher tuition fee for the instructor-led programs than the self-paced. Or perhaps I should say, they were willing to enroll in the instructor-led programs, period, and the fee that we charged was acceptable to them.
For the self-paced programs, it seemed we could not get a reasonable number of people to enroll no matter how low the price was. We did some price testing, and discovered that demand for these programs was price insensitive.
Our in-person courses were about $1,000 per person for a two-day course, so we set the fees for comparable instructor-led on-line courses around that level. Enrollment in each course was small, but at that fee level, we could cover our costs with just a handful of participants. Some courses were so popular that we had to limit enrollment in each session, so as not to overwhelm the instructor with the number of students he or she had to manage.
Of course, other factors also affect the success of an e-Learning program, including the selection of topics offered, the use of well-known expert instructors, and the presentation of the material in an interesting and effective manner. Our selection of topics and instructors, and the quality of the presentation of information, were similar in the self-paced and instructor-led courses; therefore, I have not considered the effect of these factors in comparing the two programs.
Synchronous or asynchronous
After you have chosen which type of courses to develop, instructor-led or self-paced, the design phase of your program development will include choosing the combination of tools and techniques that you plan to use for your courses. The second decision tree outlines a series of questions to consider if you have chosen instructor-led courses.
Web conferences are presently the first thing that comes to mind, since this technology has become so well developed and promoted by the many companies offering this service. However, I suggest continuing your analysis of the audience to assist you in investigating additional alternatives. Figure 2 contains the decision tree to use in this analysis. The answer to the first question, “Should I use synchronous or asynchronous communications?” will start you on the path of narrowing your technology choices.
The question at the first decision point is “Will the audience have control over their schedules and be available at the same time?”
For the scientists in my audience, the answer to this question was a resounding “yes.” Most of them worked in laboratories or offices in North America where they could conveniently schedule Web meetings during their business day.
We had some international participants in Europe, Australia, and Singapore who had to stay up very late or get up very early to join the Web conferences. However, quite a few willingly did this as the elimination of the cost and inconvenience of travel outweighed any inconvenience of joining a late evening or early morning Web conference a few times for several weeks. Those who could not avoid missing a live conference were able to view recordings later; however, to make the Web conferences work from the standpoint of interaction and instruction, the majority of participants needed to be present.
If the answer to the question of availability is “no” for the majority of your audience, then you are not likely to have well-attended Web conferences. If most of your audience would end up reviewing the recordings of the Web conferences rather than attending the live programs, then there is really no point in spending the effort and money on producing such conferences. It would be much less expensive to simply produce a recorded lecture or a written presentation of the subject matter. The use of asynchronous communications would be a better choice in this case.
An instructor can use many methods of asynchronous communication, including discussion forums, e-mail listservs, blog postings with responses, wikis, and perhaps others I haven’t thought of.
For example, some of my colleagues wanted to conduct an online training program for high school teachers who were unable to attend the in-person workshops that this group offered each summer. They wanted to have the interaction that an instructor-led program offered, but they knew that they would not be able to find a time when most of the teachers could join a Web conference. They developed a series of written and recorded online presentations, accompanied by assignments that the teachers were to complete. They divided these into separate lessons that they presented over a period of several weeks. Using a discussion forum, the instructor explained the assignment each week and directed participants to submit and discuss their results in the discussion forum.
There are more products and services available for asynchronous interactions such as discussion forums, listservs, blogs and wikis than I could begin to list, even including a few from Google and Yahoo. If you think your audience would prefer hearing lecture-style presentations to reading material written by your instructors, there are now many tools that facilitate recording presentations to be posted online. A few of these products are Camtasia, Articulate Presenter, Captivate, and Breeze.
If you answered “yes” that your audience will be available at the same time for a synchronous event, then your next question should be “Does the audience have high bandwidth Internet connections?”
Many Internet-based tools require a relatively high bandwidth for satisfactory use. Some of the Web conference service vendors claim to have software that is friendly to slow Internet connections, like dial-up. I have only had unhappy experiences with learners who tried to use slow or unreliable Internet connections to join Web conferences. They may have difficulty connecting to the conference in the first place, or frustration when graphics are slow to download and out of sync with the audio presentation. Firewall and security technology can sometimes present an insurmountable problem; however, we experienced very few problems with firewalls even though most of the participants worked in security-conscious organizations.
I think a “no” answer at this decision point should direct you to using synchronous communications that do not require high bandwidth, such as chat or instant messaging. You might even combine chat, or an online whiteboard, with a phone conference, if you feel the need to have real-time voice communication. Sometimes you can use a discussion forum in place of chat, if all users agree to post, read, and reply on the forum at a scheduled time.
If your audience has access to reliable, high bandwidth Internet connections, then a Web conference with either voice over IP (VoIP) or phone conference synchronized with the Web conference would be a viable technology choice. VoIP has gotten to be much more reliable than it used to be; however, we found that some users objected to the voice distortion and delays that can occur with it. If you have a small group, and are using a great deal of audio communication among the group, a phone conference may work better. VoIP is usually much less expensive than phone conferences; however, I also discovered that our conference phone costs per person decreased dramatically as the number of person-hours in conferences increased.
Conclusion
I hope that you have found the anecdotes in this article, and my approach to the analysis of the needs and technology capabilities of your target audience, to be helpful. There are so many variables to consider when starting or making changes to an e-Learning program, that having several different screening tools may assist your decision-making process. In the final analysis, a screening tool will only help to point you in an initial direction. Experimentation and experience will let you see what works for your audience and your subject matter. I hope that you are as lucky as I was to work in a situation that allows you the flexibility to test and try in order to find the combination that works for your organization.
