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What’s Easier: Converting ILT to E-Learning or Starting from Scratch?

NicoleLegault1's avatar
NicoleLegault1
Community Member
9 years ago

Let’s say your boss comes and asks you to convert a two-hour instructor-led training (ILT) session into an e-learning course. And since it’s already been instructionally designed, all you need to do is take the presenter’s PowerPoint files, import them into an e-learning authoring tool, and spit out a completed e-learning course—right?

If only it was that simple! Whether the course exists already or not, professional learning designers facing this task need to go through much of the same process as with any other learning project. The only difference is that when you’re working with an existing course, some of the up-front analysis and instructional design components might already be done—or not.

But before we get into the tactical steps about working with existing training, let’s take a quick look at why organizations might want to repurpose in-classroom training as e-learning in the first place.

Why Convert ILT to E-Learning? 

Organizations have a lot of good reasons for converting classroom training into e-learning, including:

  • Efficiency: develop the course once and use it over and over.
  • Accessibility: learners can access the training anytime, from anywhere in the world.
  • Cost savings: eliminate travel costs, instructor fees, etc.
  • Eco-friendly: no paper materials or emissions from travel.

Another important consideration is what’s known as the “compression ratio.” Every hour of classroom training takes about half that time to deliver when it’s converted to e-learning—a 2:1 ratio! So rather than asking employees to give up two hours of productive time to complete a classroom-based course, they only lose one hour to complete that same content online. Another win for e-learning!

It's ADDIE-As-Usual

With a myriad of reasons to turn classroom training into e-learning, now comes the tactical question: how? Here’s a secret: follow the same tried-and-true ADDIE process you do for creating new e-learning. (If you’re not familiar with ADDIE, check out this article: An Introduction to the ADDIE Model). At the end of the day, even when you’re converting an existing training course, you still need to go through all the same phases that you normally follow to create e-learning. The main difference is in the up-front analysis phase.

What's Different? 

The major difference is going to be in the first step of the ADDIE process: analysis. Why? Most of the analysis should have already been done when the classroom-based course was developed, so the analysis phase should be a lot less time consuming. A few things that should have been completed with the existing course are:

  • Audience analysis
  • Content research and gathering
  • Defining learning objectives
  • Chunking and organizing content
  • Creating activities and assessments

In reality, though, just because these things should have been completed doesn’t always mean they are complete. Sometimes they’re not done, or they’re done poorly, even when we’re working from an existing course that we’re assured has been “instructionally designed.”

All this to say that the analysis phase may or may not be easier and less time-consuming for you when you’re building e-learning from an existing classroom-based course, depending on the quality of the existing training materials.

Working with a low-quality existing course

If you’re working with a less than ideally designed course, you might have to take a step back and redo some of the tasks listed above, such as the defining of learning objectives and chunking content. When working with materials that have not been instructionally designed at all, it’s almost like you’re starting from scratch to organize and analyze the content. The only step you might save time on is the actual research and content-gathering; but even then, you might find some holes that you need to fill by doing research yourself.

Working with a high-quality existing course

If you’re lucky enough to be working with a really well-designed and solid course, the analysis might be quick and simple since you’ll be able to benefit from all the work that was already done. That said, even with high-quality training materials, you’ll probably still need to do some amount of up-front analysis.

For example, the audience analysis that was done prior to the development of the classroom training probably did not look at what kinds of devices the audience was using (desktops or tablets?) or their level of comfort with web-based training or technology in general. These are additional questions about your audience that will be specific to an e-learning course developer.

Also, even with the best materials in hand, you’ll still need to apply a certain level of instructional design to transform the content into e-learning. For example, you’ll need to convert some of the classroom activities into e-learning activities, such as drag-and-drops or matching activities, and transform the assessments into online e-learning quizzes.

In the end, converting ILT to e-learning is a straightforward process that follows the same familiar ADDIE model that you probably currently use. What is most likely to change is the amount of up-front work and analysis you have to do, which depends largely on the state of your existing training materials. If they are low quality, it’s about the same as starting from scratch and the existing course becomes just another source of material for research and content-gathering.

If you’re interested in learning more about converting classroom-based training to e-learning, take part in this community discussion: Converting ILT to E-Learning: Tips and Tricks. And if you have any experiences of your own, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

Follow us on Twitter and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning.

Published 9 years ago
Version 1.0
  • I guess it depends. Many of the materials I receive are just paragraphs of text or 19 bullets on a page. I often find it easier to create from scratch.

    Also, our ILT materials have the company-branded swooshes and graphics on them which do not translate well to eLearning materials. Real estate on the screen is key with eLearning whereas in ILT materials, they are usually meant to be "pretty" and minimalist. Our brand standards guides do not allow us to cover up portions of the templates they provide so showing a large graphic or graphic organizer often becomes difficult with company-created materials.
    • NicoleLegault1's avatar
      NicoleLegault1
      Community Member
      Thanks for sharing your experiences, Lauren. Sounds like in your case it's essentially like starting from scratch because the materials you're working with are not designed in a way that gives you a lot to work with. I imagine that's the case for many people.
  • BrianWashburn's avatar
    BrianWashburn
    Community Member
    Great post Nicole. We have this debate from time to time at my work. I'd opine that there's a continuum when it comes to work involved in going from ILT to elearning. At one extreme, you're spot on - "And since it’s already been instructionally designed, all you need to do is take the presenter’s PowerPoint files, import them into an e-learning authoring tool, and spit out a completed e-learning course—right?" This approach simply moves people from resenting the in-person experience to the online experience, and everything else in your post helps address this.

    On the other side of the continuum is a well-design ILT course. Again, you hit the nail on the head when you say that you need to convert activities for the online world (ideally it goes beyond drag and drop or quizzing activities). This is where good ILT design can really, really help take time off the up front elearning design. I've found that when I have time for discussion in an ILT class, I can carry that over into an elearning module by having people type out their thoughts to a discussion question, and then keep that on the screen while actual comments from ILT participants also pop up on the screen for comparison purposes. Or where there's role play in the ILT, it can be converted into a branching scenario.

    I suppose my point is that it *can* mean starting over (especially with poorly designed ILT materials), on the other hand, well-designed ILT really paves the way and makes the elearning design process much quicker (and more fun) and offers some insights (ILT participant comments for example) that you might not otherwise have if you had just been given an elearning project to create from scratch.
    • NicoleLegault1's avatar
      NicoleLegault1
      Community Member
      Great comments, Brian, thanks for taking the time to leave your thoughts. I have had the luxury of working with some really high quality and well-designed ILT materials myself when I've had to convert ILT to e-learning and so I know exactly what you mean about how much time it can save and how much of a huge help it can be to get things going. I think the problem is that most other people don't have that luxury and are often working with sub-par materials which they are told are "instructionally designed" but really, they aren't -- and in those cases, I feel like you're basically starting from scratch! But, maybe I'm wrong and more people than I thought are working with really well-designed ILT ... Maybe we'll find out from others in the comments here!
    • LeonaJohnson's avatar
      LeonaJohnson
      Community Member
      I agree with both you Nicole! As a I am fairly new to ID, I've already had to figure this dilemma out for myself. I am creating a series of elearning courses and for the most part, I started fresh but not because the ILT wasn't created well, it just did not transfer well into an elearning environment or experience.

      There was one course that was so comprehensive yet woven with some amazing anecdotes that I did use the PowerPoint file. I am going to take it one step further and have the SME that created the training record it with me after I make a few adjustments and tweaks.

      My reasoning stems from the fact he is the main trainer of this content and he has very distinctive voice. Having the employees hear his voice will not only give the course credibility, the delivery will make it similiar to the original ILT course he taught. It will also allow for that conversational interaction on screen.

      Open to any comments or words of wisdom anyone may have.

      Thank you!

      LYJ
  • AlisonMartin1's avatar
    AlisonMartin1
    Community Member
    Why does e-learning require half the time? How do you explain that?

    I recently converted an ILT to e-learning, but I cut out a lot of the non-essential info in order to bring it to an appropriate amount for e-learning.
    • NicoleLegault1's avatar
      NicoleLegault1
      Community Member
      Hi Alison. That's actually a great question - thanks for asking that! I'm going to throw in my two cents but really this is just my thoughts and I'd love to hear what others think contributes to the compression ratio as well...

      I think part of why the time is reduced is probably because in e-learning, versus in ILT, there is no discussion, no questions, comments from participants, and no chance for anything unplanned or off topic to come up. The course length is not impacted by how fast or how slow the presenter is speaking, or by if they go off topic or throw in a personal story that lasts 20 minutes to make a point. With e-learning you also have the option to let learners navigate at their own pace and perhaps skip pieces of content they already know, which isn't possible in a classroom setting, which may also contribute to the compression ratio.

      Those are just a few things I think could impact that. I'd love to hear others thoughts on that as well. Thanks for bringing it up Alison!!
      • jayhoffman-7d53's avatar
        jayhoffman-7d53
        Community Member
        My background is enterprise training, but I think there might be a few oranges thrown into your apple barrel, Nicole. If you compare one hour of platform lecture ("please hold all of your questions until the end") to an eLearning course covering the same content, the compression is considerably less. For example, I've found that simply converting a one-hour WEBEX'd recording of a product manager giving his product launch presentation results in approximately a 45-50 minute eLearning course.

        Now, it is true that, if you account for Q&A time and instructor-informed anecdote, you will see even more compression. However, one design consideration is that a well-constructed conversion must account for the Q&A, either by bringing the most common questions forward and rolling the answers into the content (from experience I use 80/20 here, in that 20% of all questions are recurring and account for 80% of the Q&A period), or by providing a near-time feedback loop (email response, social networking chat feature, etc.). The result is that you only recover about half of the Q&A time, either directly or indirectly (you still have to account for the cost of answering near-line/real time questions, even when posed electronically outside of the elearning recording).

        This means that the largest recovery is instructor anecdote which, while 100%, is rarely more than 5-10 minutes out of every hour. If you total up your time budget for a typical hour of training (averaged over a day long course), you get 5 minutes for comfort, 5-10 minutes for Q&A, and another 5 minutes for instructor "padding" (anecdotes). This leaves a worst-case budget of 55 minutes total seat time in an ILT environment. The best recovery you will see, though, is approximately 10 minutes (half the maximum Q&A time and all of the instructor anecdotes), reducing the committed learner seat time to 45 minutes, or slightly less than a 20% compression.

        One caveat is that, in my earlier example of the product launch presentation, the compression there seems to be intrinsic to the conversion; it has nothing to do with anecdote or Q&A period. I concluded long ago that there is a pacing advantage to eLearning over ILT attributed solely to its modality (a fancy way of saying I have no clue why, but the outcome is reliably predictable). In my case, I have learned to count on this factor when forecasting. Conservatively, I would put this at about a 15% savings and, when combined with the above calculation, the net compression can be as high as 35%. Absent any other factors, though, I would say that banking on anything more than that risks a distorted forecast and a potentially bloated curriculum -- leaving the developer with trying to stuff 10 pounds of feathers into the proverbial 5 pound bag late in the development cycle.
  • Something else that does not translate from ILT to eLearning are the questions that are asked and answered in the classroom. It is a much easier transition if the eLearning designer is familiar with the delivery of the ILT material.

    If not, it is important to put yourself in the Learner's shoes to anticipate where the questions might be and include them in the eLearning.
  • ScottKaye's avatar
    ScottKaye
    Community Member
    This exact problem is the bane of my existence when I wear my instructional designer hat. Unfortunately, it is very rare for me to find well-designed ILT materials so it is often easier for me to design from scratch.

    Even for those of us well-trained in the ADDIE model or other instructional principles, instructor-led training with powerpoint is fundamentally different than interactive self-paced online training. When I design a powerpoint for example, I am counting on my own ability as a presenter. The content is usually very light on words and heavy on imagery that helps illustrate my point. With online material I tend to count more on writen explanation than narration.
  • Darn, Duane -- I just posted a long explanation of this very factor...

    ... and THEN I read your comment! Doh!!
  • One of the issues that often arises in the transition from ILT to elearning is that thorough instructional design and development for elearning are left out of the picture. Often this results in a very poorly constructed elearning, known in my experience as "page turners." Page turners confound the learner and are likely to leave a bad taste in the mouth and to give elearning a bad name. Sadly they often deny the learner many of the benefits of great elearning:
    1. the context in which the knowledge or skill is used
    2. the application of knowledge or skill to on-the-job situations
    3. question and answer that reinforces learning
    4. chunked lessons that help ensure focus on the key elements for job performance
    . . . and so on.