Learning value chain and content summary
If Mark had known about e-Learning options beyond Webinars, he might have made a different choice for delivering his identified content. The easiest path to e-Learning is to choose what’s most familiar, but – as we all know – easiest isn’t always best.
Taking the time to lay out all the content options, matching them to the most appropriate e-Learning delivery modalities, and prioritizing them in terms of time, cost, and other resources are necessary steps. The resulting picture of the full curriculum, including a map showing how content will be presented via Webinars, asynchronously, and via instructor-led modules, provides a holistic view from which pieces and parts can be added, subtracted, moved, and changed. If your car suddenly quits running, you’d rather change the part that’s gone bad rather than the entire engine, wouldn’t you? It’s the same thing: if your education curriculum suddenly needs to change, you cannot make adaptations on the fly if all you can see are the pieces. A learning value chain shows exactly how the various courses, events, and other educational offerings contribute to each other and the whole.
Opportunities and priorities
A well-structured learning value chain will suggest your opportunities. In particular, it will help you identify content that can be re-purposed online, or to which additional e-Learning can enhance an existing face-to-face program. Prioritized, these opportunities become your initiatives. Your learning value chain can also identify gaps in your curriculum and put member program requests into the broader context. As you construct your learning value chain, consider what your competition is (or isn’t) offering, whether revenue could be generated (and whether it should), and how under-utilized constituencies might contribute, either by providing content or financial support through sponsorships or partnerships.
Assume you won’t have time, money, or personnel to accomplish everything, so prioritizing is imperative. What do you need to accomplish through your association’s e-Learning program? Increased membership? Higher levels of member participation? More members who achieve certification? Earlier licensure renewals?
Given those goals, decide what’s most important to offer online – the project that should be tackled first. Consider which opportunity should be pursued if the first one doesn’t pan out, and which projects could be developed concurrently, making the most of your time and, perhaps, your outsourcing dollar.
Don’t misunderstand this point in the process – you are not determining your tactics. You are not identifying or assigning responsibilities or tasks. You’re simply identifying opportunities for development, and prioritizing them based on need and available resources.
Infrastructure and technology
You also need to think about how equipped you are to offer e-Learning. If your small association relies on a company you pay by the hour, it’s even more important that you know exactly what you plan to do and how you will do it. Otherwise you’ll obliterate your budget just talking with your IT consultant, all before a single e-Learning offering goes live.
Unfortunately, too many association leaders decide they “need a LMS.” They invest thousands of dollars in systems that are inadequately used, or don’t work well with the membership management system already in place. When this goes on without an IT staff person to sort it out, the situation can balloon into large, unanticipated costs that will jeopardize your e-Learning initiative.
Knowing your members helps here. You have very different options if they can readily connect to the Web using high-speed access versus being in remote locations where such access isn’t available.
If your e-Learning offerings will be part of a certification or licensure program, you will make very different infrastructure choices. Decide very specifically if you must track certain information and create reports summarizing that data. Know what you can spend. Remember: everything you want is available – and an eager vendor will be happy to sell it to you – so keeping your list to “needs” instead of “wants” will keep your budget healthy.
Human resources
Too often we think to plan for hardware and software without giving a second thought to the human support required for everything we do – online or not. If you opt for a fabulous but complicated plan, who will answer questions about registrations? Online access? Course content? Who will man the phones? Answer e-mails? Send out marketing and promotional information to members, or press releases and advertising to the media? Who will design and prepare those materials?
Your strategy is driven in large part by the size of your staff, and the skill sets of the staff members and volunteers available to you. Even the best e-Learning plans fall apart when there’s no one to support them. For example, the types of skills your staff and volunteers possess determine whether you should produce your own e-Learning offerings or outsource them. If no volunteer or staff member is able to serve as the moderator for a live Webinar, why produce it in-house rather than hire a company to do it for you?
Assumptions, risks, and success
We all make assumptions. Are you assuming that the association will always give certain support for a particular initiative? That funding will remain constant? Writing out your assumptions can be an eye-opening exercise – one that will help shape your strategy.
What risks are inherent? Could the board decide to slice the requested budget but expect the same result? Could a key vendor go belly-up? Identify everything you believe could put your e-Learning program in jeopardy. Then identify what should be done to avoid or alleviate the fallout from each risk. Whose expectations need to be managed around risks that can’t be avoided nor alleviated? Having a carefully planned risk mitigation plan will go a long way in gaining the trust and confidence of your association leaders and members.
Sometimes just launching a first or second e-Learning event and having people register feels like a triumph, but you need real measures of success so you can plan for future e-Learning programs and justify additional investment in them. While it’s tempting to create criteria that are easily met (“Look at how successful our online learning has been!”), only specific measures will benefit you in the long run. Your success should be based on how well you met the goals of your initiative – as you defined them earlier. Adding specific numbers gives you something to measure: “Success will be achieved if our e-Learning programs increase the overall participation in our education programs by 25%.” Maybe you need to be sure these additional 25% are spread across all chapters. Why not establish your baseline now, so you’ll have something to measure your performance against later?
Pulling it all together
Strategies are just that – strategies. They are game plans for tackling challenges, achieving goals, and providing the background for task lists and action items. While it’s important to document your strategy so you can share it and refer to it, the format should take whatever form best fits your needs. You might find that a few different documents are most useful – a broad education strategy and a sub-strategy that focuses on e-Learning has worked for many organizations.
You might find that you need to include a timeline or a projected budget, areas not covered here because of their complexity. Whatever you decide to cover in your strategy should be based on research, evidence, and analysis. Those are hard to argue, and will make it easier to sell your strategy and any initiatives it covers.
Resist the temptation to put out a call to colleagues for copies of strategic plans to use as a model. There’s great value in collaboration and best practices, but you risk focusing on product, rather than the process, if you rely on someone else’s model.
If Mark’s call had been the result of following a strategic planning process, he would have known whether he was seeking a vendor to produce a Webinar or create an asynchronous course, or if they needed to investigate LMS and LCMS options. Instead, he got a question back for every question he asked, rather than the recommendations and suggestions he was hoping to hear.
In the long run, the time you spend developing a workable strategy will ensure the money you invest in systems or software is well-spent, and that the content and delivery options you have chosen are well-received. Just don’t forget to re-visit your strategy – it’s a process you should continue to tweak, update, and use, not a binder collecting dust on your shelf.
