Estimating the cost of an e-Learning project is a dilemma that most project managers face on a regular basis. You may have to develop the course the customer wants from scratch, or the content may already be in the form of a slide program. Potential customers frequently request a ballpark estimate of these costs. The typical response is, “Well, it depends.”
Coming up with a cost for Web-based training is like pricing a car: there are so many options that it becomes very challenging to provide an accurate response.
Beyond the obvious activities, such as a kick-off meeting, master schedule, project plan, and status reports, each of which involves the use of primary project management software, guiding a project to success requires developing another layer of documents and tools. Management often overlooks these secondary project management tools, and they probably are not in the project budget. The primary layer of deliverables is certainly necessary, however, those schedules, plans, and reports typically do not address what you need to do on a daily or weekly basis.
In this article, I present a number of tools that contribute to the successful completion of a project. Some of the tools are obvious, but, hopefully, the discussion here will provide you with some new ideas, or validate what you are already doing as correct.
The collection of tools and tips in this article are the result of development over a number of years. I actively employ them today, and they have been keys to highly successful training programs. These tools evolved because of increasing pressure to rapidly prototype distance learning projects. Specific design requirements and tight budgets drive the tools, which are appropriate for use across all sectors, whether academic, private, or government.
Tool #1: The right questions to ask
Ten simple questions can aid communication with a customer during scope determination. I have found that these “Top Ten Must Ask Questions” will stimulate a productive conversation with a potential customer. (See Table 1.)
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Question |
Key Information |
| 1. Who is the target audience? | Design the course to match the customer. If you are training GMC sales representatives don’t use a graphic of a Ford vehicle. |
| 2. What is the average level of education and experience? | Make sure you write the content to an appropriate reading level. Example: Sr. Engineer vs. entry-level engineer. |
| 3. Do you have any issues or concerns that need we need to address in the training? | Make sure the training is applicable to their needs. Example: Help Desk receives 200 calls daily for assistance with logging-on to system. |
| 4. What delivery method(s) do you foresee using, or that you can support? | If your customer is thinking classroom training and you deliver CBT, you have a problem. |
| 5. Do you want to track student progress? | A Yes answer means you need to start talking about using a Learning Management System (LMS) to track student progress. |
| 6. Do you currently use a LMS? | The course design must be compatible with the LMS you are using. Example: LMS X may have four logical levels, while LMS Y only has three. |
| 7. Do you have to comply with Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)? | SCORM compliance adds about 5% labor effort to a project. |
| 8. Do you have to comply with Section 508 of the American Disabilities Act (ADA)? | Having to write descriptive text for graphics and tables can add 10% to 15% labor effort to a project. |
| 9. What is the timeline to complete the course? | Customers tend to compress schedules, and don’t understand how long it really takes to develop and review a course. Even with adequate resources, three months is the shortest timeline for developing a WBT course. |
| 10. What level of interactivity are you expecting? | This is a difficult concept to define and explain, but you need common understanding on this issue. Low, medium, or high levels are adequate to scope a project. There is about a 50% increase in labor effort from one level to the next. |
These questions are by no means all inclusive, but they will help guide early discussions. They also gather beneficial information needed to prepare an estimate, as well as provide the beginnings of your design document.
Tool #2: Instructional Design Document (IDD)
Once a project starts, and you are writing a Training Plan, you should also be developing an IDD. The IDD defines the course objectives, module objectives, terminal learning objectives (TLOs), measurement methods, and design issues for a course. The IDD should also include learning levels. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives is an excellent tool to determine the learning level for each objective.
The information in the IDD is critical to a project’s success. By default, it determines the scope baseline and roadmap for the course. Given this information, an instructional designer knows the exact content needed to satisfy each TLO. TLOs for each module provide constraints for the scope of the module content. The IDD also serves as a guide for developers to follow for the structure and design of the course. Lastly, it serves as a communication tool with the customer and the development team. Table 2 illustrates a format for the IDD starting with the module objective.
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Sample Module Objectives MODULE OBJECTIVE: Understand the documents used in the Requirements Process, and who is responsible for completing themTerminal Objectives:
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The information in the ISD communicates the design structure, content, and scope of a project at the TLO level. This information can be the basis for a detailed schedule.
Tool #3: On-Line Exam Tool
Most Learning Management Systems (LMSs) on the market today have some capability for student assessments. A few of them have very good testing capabilities, while others have rather crude testing tools by today’s standards. Sometimes customers need to provide customized feedback at the individual response level rather than at the question level. This is a requirement that very few LMSs can support. A good alternative is to build your own on-line testing tool. This requires some planning, but it is not extremely difficult to code the tool.
A developer can code an on-line testing tool in JavaScript with a XML-driven exam generator for Web-based courseware. This will enable creation of customizable end-of-module or end-of-course exams. Since you can integrate such a tool with various LMSs, it is adaptable to the needs of various customers. Here are the features and functionality you should consider for an online exam tool:
- Required files are self-contained within the exam folder, allowing addition of exams to new or existing courses
- Pulls all of the questions, answers, feedback, and general parameters required to generate an exam from a single, editable XML file
- Adds, edits, and deletes exam content (questions, answers, feedback) via the XML data file for quick and easy creation and updates
- Random selection of exam questions from one or more question pools allows generation of a unique set of questions each time a student takes the exam
- Allows mapping of question pools to individual TLOs
- Allows exam questions and answers to be either text-based or graphics-based, or a mixture of both
- Creates both recorded and unrecorded exams
- Allows for either single or multiple answer attempts per question by the student
- Allows for optional review of course content during the exam
- Includes a customizable style sheet to allow easy changing of exam fonts, headings, and colors to match other course content
- Is SCORM-compatible
- Provides individual question response feedback
Tool #4: Cascading Style Sheets (CSSs)
Prior to CSSs, the HTML markup contained most display attributes of HTML documents. This included font colors, background styles, spatial alignments, and sizes. You had to describe borders repeatedly within the HTML. CSSs allow developers to move much of this information to a separate style sheet, resulting in easier HTML markup. The benefit of CSSs is faster development and standardization when multiple developers work on a course.
With the emergence of CSSs, developers now generally use HTML to support the structure of a page such as headings and paragraphs. However, rules declared in a style sheet define appearance, such as font color and size. The benefit of using CSSs is faster development and standardization when multiple developers work on a course. CSSs can benefit projects by doing a number of things, including:
- Controlling the HTML pages’ background color and margins
- Defining the font typeface, size, and color for each
of the following:
- Page headings
- Paragraph text
- Text in tables
- Text in bulleted and unordered lists
- Text in form fields and their associated labels
- Defining graphics used for page backgrounds and bullet symbols
- Setting the width, color, and style for HTML table borders
- Defining custom styles that JavaScript can manipulate to reveal or hide elements on the HTML page (e.g., create expandable or collapsible menus, create “click to reveal” text elements, etc.)
- Providing ability to quickly change style and formatting of all HTML pages during design and development of WBT courses
Besides distinguishing the structural and presentational aspects of a document, CSSs have additional benefits:
- Greater flexibility with styling, allowing for more variety in looks
- Easier to use than HTML, allowing for quicker development
- Wider flexibility, allowing a single style sheet to affect multiple Web pages
- Smarter than HTML, allowing for special styles that intelligently override general style presentation
- More powerful than HTML, allowing control over parts of an interface
- More practical than HTML, allowing for Web pages of smaller file size
- More ready for the future, allowing for styling XML elements
Tool #5: Page Templates
When there are multiple people, at various skill levels, developing a course, it is necessary to use page templates in order to keep a consistent look and feel throughout the course. Page templates control the presentation of a single Web page. They focus on controlling the navigation, interface, links, and other page attributes. At a minimum, there should be templates for pages that repeat throughout a course. These pages may include formats for menu, introduction, content, summary, instruction, and question pages. Using templates saves time, and they keep instructional designers and Web developers in harmony. The style considerations for page templates are:
- Supply the navigation/interface code for each page of the course
- Define the links to external files that are required for page functionality and “look and feel”
- Provide common code, interface elements, SCORM functionality, etc. to ensure consistency across all pages in a course
- Provide ability to quickly do the following across an
entire course during design and development:
- Change or enhance the course interface
- Change the look and feel
- Add or change page functionality
- Add or remove SCORM functionality
Summary
Project managers, instructional designers, and developers of e-Learning projects need to develop a toolkit of repeatable processes in order to be competitive in today’s market. Even though there are excellent products on the market for courseware development, you still need tools and methods that help expedite productivity on a daily basis. The tools presented in this article are flexible, and you can apply them across multiple projects.
