Peeling the First Two Layers of the e-Learning Onion: Designing and Developing an In-house e-Learning Program

It was the morning of January 7th, 2003, and I arrived early at work in Tokyo with a sense of anticipation because today was the day! Today was the launch day of the AIG Companies, Japan, nationwide online English-language telephone training program. I had spent the last nine months preparing for this day. It was like waiting in line for a roller coaster. I usually get this sense of excitement because I know the ride is going to be fun, but at the same time, the wait fills me with dread because I am always thinking, “What happens if the roller coaster derails or I fall out?”

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That’s how launching my first AIG online training program felt. When I arrived at work, I turned on my PC and then went to get a can of coffee out of the vending machine, so I could sit down and drink in the feeling of accomplishment. (Yes, you can buy canned coffee out of a vending machine in Japan along with a number of other items like corn soup, cigarettes and beer, although thankfully some of these items are not available in the office.)

As my PC slowly came to life, I sipped my coffee savoring its strong, bitter taste. When I clicked the Internet Explorer icon on my desktop and typed in the address for the online telephoning course login page, I saw one of the most terrifying things I could have imagined.

Written across my login.asp page was the word “ERROR.” My initial thought was, “Don’t panic. You must’ve typed in the wrong address.” Imagine my horror when I typed it in again and the same message stared back at me! ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! Nine months of blood, sweat and tears! Oh, the humanity! I felt like my roller coaster car had just derailed and I was plummeting to the ground.

Oh, OK... it wasn’t as bad as all that. As it turned out, I didn’t plunge to my death. The cause of the error message was a problem with the server. This had never happened during the development and testing phases of the course. However, it just so happened to occur on the very day of the nationwide launch. The good news is that the server was up and running by 1:00 that afternoon and 130 participants registered for the course within the first week.

Why keep reading?

This article is a must for anyone who has thought about developing an e-Learning program in-house, is thinking about doing so, or who is already in the planning stages. Would you like to find out what happens behind the scenes of e-Learning program development, from Learning Management Systems (LMS) and video production, to promotion, marketing, and calculating Return on Investment (ROI)? As Kevin Moore and Greg Harmeyer wrote in their April 23, 2002 article in Learning Solutions Magazine, “How to Determine the Real Cost of e-Learning Programs,” ”Costing e-Learning is like peeling an onion... there are many layers, they don’t ever seem to end, and sometimes it really smells.”

By reading this article, and the sequel to be published next week, you will learn how at AIG Companies, Japan we designed, developed, and implemented a 10- to 15-hour language skills training program for our employees. This blended learning application, and its supporting LMS, were created in-house.

In the course of this investigation, we will examine three of the many layers of the e-Learning onion and we will look in detail at the steps we took in each. At the end of the second article, I will review our results and the lessons learned.

You will see how we learned from our mistakes in 2002, and how we are planning to implement our 2003 online course without all the tears (just the blood and sweat). In this week’s installment you will learn how to protect yourself from the awful odor of the e-Learning onion through the use of Moore and Harmeyer’s initial costing check sheets for the design and technical elements. These will help you avoid the many tears that are usually associated with implementing an e-Learning program. In the long run, using the check sheets will lower your production costs. Let’s begin.

Layer 1 of the e-Learning onion: The design phase

We really should begin by reviewing the background of AIG’s 2002 e-Learning program, the Online Telephoning Skills project.

When I was hired, about two and a half years ago, one of my goals was to help AIG meet their English-oriented needs with a Web-based solution. My first job was to design, implement and manage an e-Learning program to be provided by a vendor, within the context of AIG Japan’s already established International Communications Program (ICP). With the vendor’s help, delivery system, and content, we produced an interactive, immersive simulation, supported by both live and teleconference orientation sessions and by online “e-Trainers.” This ICP e-Learning business-English language program was highly successful. It resulted in improved English-language proficiency test scores and raised employee confidence in their business-English skills. (Editor’s Note: See “Making e-Learning Work at AIG Japan: A Case Study” for the details of the author’s 2001-2002 project.)

After the ICP simulation’s one-year online pilot started, in February of 2002 I approached my manager with an idea to develop our own online training program in-house. This is my true passion. I think the challenge, creativity and sense of accomplishment that comes from seeing something you have created from scratch become something that people use and learn from is tremendously satisfying. That is, it is satisfying until you get your first email from a learner saying that they can’t see your page or there’s no sound. That’s a whole set of new emotions that I will get into at the end of next week’s article.

AIG’s 2002 e-Learning project business objectives

I think everyone has a little tech nerd inside of them just waiting to get out. I was eager to let mine loose because I had a lot of exciting ideas waiting to be realized about the next steps we could take. Luckily for me my manager, Lisa Sanders, had already been thinking along the same lines and was very open to any ideas that I had.

Lisa was considering using the Web because she felt we needed a blended solution to train employees in AIG-specific material. By combining Web-based content with our current classroom-based language skills training programs, we could enhance the learning experience and provide a lot more value and return on our investment. During the next two months, we also found that our Web-based solution could be used as an open-enrollment nationwide training program.

Meeting a need: Basic English Telephoning Skills workshop: The first step after getting the go-ahead was to look at our current classroom-based training programs and decide which ones would benefit most from a blended approach. We decided that out of all of our English business-skills training programs, Basic English Telephoning Skills was the best match. Every year, this workshop received the most applications for enrollment from employees. We felt we would be able to create an online program that would improve the effectiveness of our current workshop. Providing an online nationwide open enrollment was another important benefit: anyone in Japan with access to our intranet could improve his or her telephoning skills. This may seem a pretty simple way to approach our needs analysis, but this was our first online course, so we wanted to keep it simple and do something we knew deep down inside would add value to our program.

You may be asking yourself, “How difficult can it be to talk on the phone?” Well, have you tried to do it in a foreign language? It’s pretty difficult. At AIG Japan there is a need for English telephoning skills training because AIG is a global company and English is the main language used worldwide for communication.

Design phase: Initial costing check sheet

The next step in the design phase, after doing a needs analysis, should be to use Moore and Harmeyer`s “Design Phase — Initial Costing Check Sheet” to plan the details of your e-Learning course. The purpose of filling in this chart is to give you a rough idea of how expensive the development of your course is going to be.

To be honest, I didn’t do this when I was designing our 2002 course. Moore and Harmeyer’s article was published after we began.

That being said, I did learn a lot when I finally saw the article in Learning Solutions Magazine, and so I decided to complete this chart after the fact. This helped me see where I could make improvements in the development process for our 2003 program. Now I am able to save time by being better organized and prepared. The Design Phase — Initial Cost Check Sheet with my notes reflecting our experience in the 2002 e-Learning course design is shown in Sidebar 1, at the end of this article.

In order to better organize myself, my original check sheet contained very detailed notes about each of the activities. In this way, I knew exactly what needed to be done in every section. By doing this, the vision became much clearer to everyone on the team. When you use this check sheet for your own projects, add as much detail as you can in the beginning. You can always go back and delete things later.

I have provided a number of my own questions in the sidebar. You will probably have many more of your own. I also added sections to the check sheet for planning alpha and beta testing and for final production.

(For further explanation of each variable in the left-hand column of the check sheet, please see Moore and Harmeyer’s article.)

Technical — Initial costing check sheet

In addition to using the Design Phase — Initial Costing Check Sheet to plan the details of your e-Learning course, you should complete the “Technical — Initial Costing Check Sheet” that also appears in Moore and Harmeyer’s article. The purpose of this chart is to further refine your estimate of how expensive the development of your course is going to be.

Once again, I didn’t do this when I was designing my 2002 course. One mistaken assumption I made when designing the course was that integrating a custom-made tracking system (LMS) with our course would be easy. I certainly learned my lesson! Just because you have a working knowledge of ASP, VBScript and Access, does not mean you can create an LMS complete with student progress reports on your own. You need a very strong knowledge of VBScript and SQL to get this working properly.

Once again, completing this check sheet after the fact was still useful, because I could apply the “lessons learned” to the development process for our 2003 program. Moore and Harmeyer’s Technical — Initial Cost Check Sheet appears, with my notes, in Sidebar 2 at the end of this article.

Design model completion advice

Once you have completed the check sheets, you will have a very good idea of where you are going. When your team has reviewed your ideas, it is time to figure out how and when you are going to get there. To accomplish this, you will need to create a design model that lists tasks, deliverables, due dates and roles and responsibilities.

This is very different than the check sheets in the Sidebars. For example, before starting the development phase of your e-Learning program it is very important to know the answers to these specific questions:

• Who is responsible for content creation and when each lesson is due?
• When are you planning to shoot your videos?
• When is your studio reservation?
• Who is going to make the reservations?
• Who will be your talent?
• Who is going to do the taping?
• Who is going to do the video editing and video compression?
• When is the entire taping and editing going to be completed for the first lesson?
• Who is going to do the programming?
• When is each lesson due?
• Are you going to use a consultant?
• When are you going to contact him/her?
• When are the vocabulary Flash games due?
• Who is going to do it?
• Who is going to proof it?
• When is proofing due?

All of these questions (and possibly hundreds more) must be answered before you even think about entering the development phase. Always keep in mind who, what, where, when and how for all of the steps you need to complete in the development phase. Be organized. I am not going to give you my design model complete with due dates, deliverables and roles and responsibilities here because there simply isn’t enough room. If you would like to see a good example of the level of detail I am talking about, please see my earlier article, referred to in the background discussion on page 2.

Layer 2 of the e-Learning onion: The development phase

Once you have finished designing your course and filling in the design and technical check sheets and creating your design model, it is time to move on to the second layer of the e-Learning onion — the development phase. What follows is the story of our 2002 e-Learning course development at AIG Japan. There are four main parts to this story: prototype development, shooting your own video, using Active Server Pages and VBScript to deliver the course, and creating your own Learning Management System.

Prototype development

The development of our Online Telephoning Skills prototype was mostly done in my home office... oh, OK... it’s not really an office. It is more like office/spare bedroom/storage space. When we first started the project we didn’t have the hardware and software that could handle the video and audio that I planned to use, so I improvised and did everything at home. In my office/bedroom/storage space I designed our ICP brand image and shot most of the original prototype videos.

My colleague and Subject Matter Expert, Claudia Colnar, put the content into a Word document. I took that home and put it into the prototype course template using Flash, audio, video and graphics. At the same time Lisa Sanders, our program manager, was working very hard on getting us the budget for the proper software and equipment, so we could continue developing our Online Telephoning Course at the office and securing for us the use of our in-house video studio. We went from shooting low-quality home videos (with my laundry bin in the background!) to producing professional-quality e-Trainer instructional videos.

Completing the prototype at home made it possible to show Lisa what we were able to do and also what I really envisioned doing in the future. Lisa was then able to use the prototype to help secure the proper equipment and software to do the remaining lessons at the office. The process of creating the prototype required from March 2002 until August 2002.

A quick note about video production — and being prepared

We were very lucky in our video development because there were only two of us to act as director, talent, video production expert and online media specialist. Claudia Colnar, the SME, and I certainly wore a lot of hats in the development phase, especially regarding video production.

When we shot the video for our Online Classroom as we call it, we would take turns being talent and director (see Figure 1). The director’s job was to run the camera and lights and also act as the script holder. This means after the director said action, she would slowly move the script up behind the camera, so the talent could simply read from it. Because we held the script behind and just above the camera, it looked like we were looking into the camera and saying our lines from memory. Look out CNN! If you have never done video production before, it certainly is exhausting. Now I know why the big stars need assistants to bring them water and fruit. (We had to get our own coffee and corn soup from the vending machine.)

FIGURE 1 Claudia Colnar, our SME, and the author, starring in our instructional e-Videos.

Sometimes we needed to be really creative with our video production because we had limited resources and time. For example, in the conversation section of each lesson, we needed to create a realistic conversation on the telephone between two people. In order to do this we simply asked for volunteers in our office to spend thirty minutes reading from a script to play the roles of caller and receiver in our e-Videos. This turned out to be very effective and realistic.

We would shoot the video of one of our co-workers on the phone at my desk from the side, so he or she could look straight ahead and read directly from the script that we pinned up on my cubicle wall in front of them (see Figure 2). Each volunteer would say all of their lines pausing in between each of them. After both volunteers completed their lines, I would take the video that I captured directly on my PC with our digital camera and quickly edit the video clips together, so the final product looked like they were actually talking to each other. This whole process of shooting and editing a ninety-second conversation took about 2 to 3 hours. We became very efficient in our video and audio creation.

FIGURE 2 Mike Sorey, a fellow trainer, starring in one of our e-Video conversations filmed in our office.

If you are getting into video production, you need to be really organized and prepared by creating a design model before getting started. You will also need a digital video camera that you can connect to your PC during video shoots (Sony and Canon are both very good brands).

By capturing the video directly onto your PC you will save a lot of time. If you shoot the video first just using your video camera and then transfer the video to the PC later, you will be wasting a lot time waiting for the data to be recorded onto your PC. This way kills two birds with one stone. Remember, you have limited time, so you need to do everything you can to save it.

To do this you will need a good PC with lots of RAM and a fast processor. Our Sony VAIO Laptop has 512 MB of RAM and a 2.4 GHz processor. We haven’t had any problems. You will also need a Firewire or iLink cable to connect your digital camera to your PC.

Finally, you will need good video editing software like Vegas Video 4.0. This software allows you to capture and edit video and audio and exports the final product as Window Media files or the compression format of your choice. For more information about video editing, please see “Repurposing Taped Video for e-Learning Part I and Part II: From Tape to Hard Drive” by Stephen Haskin.

Development with Active Server Pages and VBScript

Every year my wife, Masayo, and I travel back to Oshawa, my hometown just outside Toronto for our summer vacation. Last year, I decided to combine my trip with some technical training at XtraNet (www.xnu.com). For 5 days in August I studied how to use Macromedia Ultra Dev and how to make Active Server Pages. After studying and learning about VBScript and how to make dynamic web pages, I applied what I had learned to my online project. We had already completed about 70% of the content by this point and I had put most of it into HTML pages. When I returned to Tokyo, my first job was to convert all of my HTML pages into Active Server Pages. which was quite easy but hardly even the beginning of the story. The next step was to learn how to use VBScript and forms to pass participants’ quiz answers to an answer page and give them a score in the form of a percentage. We also needed to figure out how to create a “custom-made” LMS.

Making Quizzes. Thanks to Robert Ross, one of the excellent trainers at XtraNet, and www.15seconds.com, I was able to figure out how to do this.

Note: If you have never heard of 15seconds. com, then I highly recommend you check it out, if you have questions or problems with your Active Server Pages, SQL or databases. It is an excellent resource. Simply register, login, post your question and wait for your answer. It doesn’t get any better than that. Oh yes... they don’t give you the answer outright — they try to teach you how to do it by pointing you in the right direction and having you try to figure it out on your own.

There were two key issues that had to be resolved during all this quiz development: Fill-in-the-blank quizzes, and what to do if there is more than one correct answer.

Fill-in-the-blank quizzes. When you create a quiz in Macromedia Dreamweaver, you will be using a form that passes the learners’ answers to either the same page or a separate answer page. I found it easier to pass the answers to a separate answer page. 

The VBScript code that Rob and 15seconds. com helped me develop does three really cool things. It tells your application to:

1. Ignore spaces in the students’ answer and to change their answer into lower case letters, which means their answers can contain capitals or small letters. This was a real problem when we were testing the prototype. Many participants complained that they had answered the question correctly, but the system marked it incorrect.
2. Calculate how many questions the learner got correct and what their percentage is.
3. Display the word “Correct” if the student typed in the correct answer or display the phrase “Incorrect: the correct answer is ...” if the answer was incorrect.

More than one correct answers. Once I had written the code, I was able to modify it so the system could accept multiple answers. This was another complaint we received from the participants and trainers during the testing phase. In English there are many ways to say the same thing. VBScript allowed me write code that accepted more than one answer to a question.

Custom-made LMS: TrainTracker 2000

TrainTracker2000 is the name I gave our custom-made Learning Management System (The name’s not that bad... I had to name it something, didn’t I?) This includes the Access database, site infrastructure and report pages. Keep reading to learn how I created this, one layer at a time.

Access Database Design: Just being able to give students a quiz score was great but it wasn’t nearly enough. The next step was to design a database that could track their scores in a table that identified whose score it was and what lesson it came from. I also needed to know what quiz it came from. Was it a listening quiz score or conversation quiz score? This was the level of detail I needed. Before I even touched the Access icon on my PC, I spent a lot of time planning what I wanted my final report pages to look like, so I sat down and put my rough ideas on paper.

Individual Reports Page. I wanted to track 1) total time spent per lesson and 2) all quiz scores. I wanted all of this information to be displayed in a neat and tidy table, with the student’s name, company, contact information and manager’s name displayed just above the table.

I also wanted an employee selection page to come before the report page, where the course administrator and managers could see everyone who registered for the course and select the employee that they wanted to see a detailed progress report for. This page would only contain the information that the student would enter on the registration page. There wouldn’t be any course progress details.

All of this sounded pretty straightforward at the time. As it turned out this was much more difficult than I had originally thought. However, I know now that I simply needed to be better prepared in the Design phase.

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