Who wants to live in a house that was built overnight? You would be convinced that too many shortcuts were taken. Similarly, there are those who would convince you that creating e-Learning is a piece of cake. If you use their tool, their process, or their design approach, you will be able to start now and have stellar e-Learning ready to go by the end of next week.
Really? While some of this comes from the natural exuberance of people trying to sell you something, some of it comes from people absolutely convinced of what they say. We believe otherwise. Rather, our experience suggests that it is rarely the case that good e-Learning can be created overnight (or even in a fortnight).
Our subject here centers on authoring tools. Why are there so many of them and why doesn’t one of them reign supreme, putting all others out of business? Some tool vendors will claim that their tool is the only one you will ever need. Again, this is not often true. Why not?
The purpose-driven e-Learning design
Notice the title of this article. It is not called The Right Job for the Tool. That would be a case of the tail wagging the dog, yet that is a well-traveled path. The design of e-Learning should be purpose-driven, not tool-driven. We should not decide what we will design based on a tool’s features; we should determine what tools are needed to accommodate our design, if it is truly necessary for the learning to be effective.
When we speak of the right job, it seems that we are strongly implying that your tool needs may change from one job to the next. Make no mistake about it – that’s exactly what we mean. However, we also recognize that there exist real-world limitations and we will take those into account as well.
Simply put, the reason e-Learning applications take time and effort to create is that each situation requires a blend of common and unique approaches if it is to prove valuable. To this end, we have boiled down our subject to four important factors, which we call the T-set (Figure 1):
-
Talent
-
Topics
-
Techniques
-
Tools
Figure 1. The T-set: The four important factors in tool selection.
Each of the above is a major factor in choosing the right tool for your particular needs. We will look at the first three to help us decide on the fourth, Tools.
We speak and write from our experiences working in this field for a number of years. Keep in mind, however, that these are our experiences. Of course, you should weigh them against your own and that of others. While we really do believe that what we have to say is valuable, the truth once again is that your experience may vary.
Note also our subtitle “Optimize Talent, Topics, Techniques, and Tools.” We believe the best approach is to consider each new e-Learning assignment in its own light, or T-set, and then determine which factors are the most relevant for your tool selection.
The tradeoff
As is true of most things in life, there is a tradeoff to be had when choosing tools. On the one hand, a simple tool, like a hammer, keeps life simple, but you know what happens: everything then ends up looking like a nail. A complex tool, represented by the Swiss army knife in Figure 2, can do a lot but is unwieldy, complex, and has a steep learning curve: just knowing what each function of the tool can do takes time, then learning how to use each feature and when to use it takes even more time.
Figure 2. The tool tradeoff exemplified: simple or complex?
Even among similar tools, such as the pliers in Figure 3, there can be enough differences that you may still mistakenly choose the wrong one and the end result may not be pretty.
Figure 3. Even with tools that are similar, the differences matter.
The question, then, is do you stick with something simple like PowerPoint or Articulate, or do you work with something more powerful but more complex, like SmartBuilder, Captivate, or even Flash Actionscript?
