Many years ago we spent a year and a team of four converting our lessons from Authorware to Flash, then we were converting them from Flash to Articulate Presenter. The reality is that in order to keep with the trends, technologies and content updates we need time and its something we usually don't have. An now with the lack of flash support on bowsers, we need to have a plan on what are we going to do with all our eLearning lessons as we have some developed on Presenter 09, storyline 1 and storyline 2. They all output swf files.
When you have 1000’s of eLearning lessons and you keep receiving request for more, how do you maintain your content and technologies up to date?
Does anyone have a Maintenance Schedule or strategy for this?
Hi, Veronica! Sounds like you have your work cut out for you!
I think there are three main things you need to do:
First, you and your team MUST dedicate a percentage of your capacity to updating your old Flash courses. There's no way around it. This might require you to select particular members of your team to handle the old courses OR you each dedicate a percentage of your time amongst all of your developers.
Second, you need to go through all of your old courses and select the ones that have the largest business priority and focus on those first. Ask yourself how the business will suffer that particular course was no longer available. Maybe you create an "advisory team" of SMEs, stakeholders, and leadership to help make these decisions. They too need know that you won't be able to update ALL of the courses at once (in addition to building new courses).
Third, you should also figure out how long it takes your team to update/build a hour of e-learning content. Knowing this figure can help you estimate how much you can handle and how long it will take.
In my organization, normally the course content has to be updated too. Rarely we see a course content that has to be updated only in the technical aspect. We archive the old versions of the courses and we create the new versions with the new current software.
Those courses that have been "abandoned", that is, courses in the LMS that are made in older versions and have no enrollment, we identify via a report, and then we contact the course owners about archiving the courses if they are not in use. Those which content hasn't changed and need to be updated are then identified and updated with the new software versions. By the time we have to do that, there aren't that many courses to update.
The courses we design don't belong to us (I should have started with that), so the owners are responsible for updating the content, which is normally the case; that gives us the opportunity to also update the courses with the new software versions.
Veronica -- I've found it helpful to have an Access database or perhaps a sharepoint site with every course in my library. I track about 15 data points for each course, including authoring software release, sunset date, supported platforms and audiences, recent updates, complete path to the source files, etc... Then, once a year, you can filter that list and revisit the likely candidates for updates.
It also helps to follow the release updates from Articulate, as well as the iOS and Android bugs and releases updates so that you can plan for the most effective time to update. Having the database also makes it easy to tell stakeholders which courses have "X" or "Y." For example, which courses in the last two years had the old logo, or which courses were supporting tablets.
4 Replies
Hi, Veronica! Sounds like you have your work cut out for you!
I think there are three main things you need to do:
I hope this helps! Best of luck!
Tim
In my organization, normally the course content has to be updated too. Rarely we see a course content that has to be updated only in the technical aspect. We archive the old versions of the courses and we create the new versions with the new current software.
Those courses that have been "abandoned", that is, courses in the LMS that are made in older versions and have no enrollment, we identify via a report, and then we contact the course owners about archiving the courses if they are not in use. Those which content hasn't changed and need to be updated are then identified and updated with the new software versions. By the time we have to do that, there aren't that many courses to update.
The courses we design don't belong to us (I should have started with that), so the owners are responsible for updating the content, which is normally the case; that gives us the opportunity to also update the courses with the new software versions.
its good to have a change request concept running so that you can prioritise changes to courses. Use dates on files so you know which one is which.
Have a five year strategy about the courses which will be required to be launched
Veronica -- I've found it helpful to have an Access database or perhaps a sharepoint site with every course in my library. I track about 15 data points for each course, including authoring software release, sunset date, supported platforms and audiences, recent updates, complete path to the source files, etc... Then, once a year, you can filter that list and revisit the likely candidates for updates.
It also helps to follow the release updates from Articulate, as well as the iOS and Android bugs and releases updates so that you can plan for the most effective time to update. Having the database also makes it easy to tell stakeholders which courses have "X" or "Y." For example, which courses in the last two years had the old logo, or which courses were supporting tablets.
Good luck
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