In looking at ways to be more agile around our course design, one of the things that is being considered is having non-instructional designers (trainers, SMEs) make the simpler edits in courses. I'm leery of this idea for a number of reasons, but I'm trying to keep an open mind. So I thought I'd reach out here to get some feedback.
Has anyone else consider this or implemented this, and, if so, what did you feel were the pros and cons?
If you implemented this, what guidelines did you have for non-IDs making edits? Has it been successful?
If you chose not to implement this, what were the deciding factors?
I just want to be sure look at this from all perspectives. Thanks in advance for any insight you might have to share.
I've never heard of anyone having trainers or SMEs do simple edits in courses.
The main drawback: They'd need to have an Articulate license, which would be a big expense for this small contribution.
And to edit a shared Rise course, they'd need to have a Team license (assuming the organization has that type). Otherwise, they could only edit a copy, and then you'd have to track which copy is the most current version.
They'd need enough training on the software to be able to access all the text. For example, some objects might have extra text within States, which aren't visible when just looking at the slide in edit mode.
There's also the possibility that they'd accidentally click something that would cause problems, e.g., hide an object or turn off a trigger.
An alternative might be to use the Translation feature to export the text to Word. Have them edit the Word file, and then import it back into the project.
This would still require some special learning on their part, to ensure they only edit where they need to edit.
Bottom line: Personally, I think it's easiest to just collect feedback--even about simple edits--and have a developer enter them.
For decades, centuries, even, colleges and universities have subscribed to the idea that the main determiner of academic success is the subject expertise of the teacher. In very recent times, most of them have come to the realization that teaching ability has as much, or more effect on how learners learn. Rather than taking on the very daunting task of training their professors (some of whom already are very skilled teachers) to teach, they have brought a new class of helper alongside them. That's where the concept of ID's came from. They are the teaching and curriculum experts. (Coincidently, that's why landscape, graphic, bridge, and other designers are not good choices for designing instruction.) Business is way ahead of academia in discovering and implementing this.
With that as background, I'm going to make a bunch of assumptions about your questions, and try to answer them. It sounds to me like you have courses that have been through the design stage, and are aligned with the curriculum, storyboarded, through the initial stage of development, and in the hands of the e-authoring or development crew. Also assuming you have considered and solved Judy's concerns about licensing and SL ability.Those people typically have a backlog of several months or more, and you are looking to ease their load, specifically with spelling, grammar, phrasing, quality assurance, and other post-design tasks - tasks that almost anybody in your organization can do, especially if the edits are laid out for them. It is a given that no matter what their title, all of your people will differ in their level of design, authoring, teaching, communication, grammar, and spelling skills. Some will be better than others. That may be the starting point for your decision.
Know first, that if these are either in-person or hybrid classes, the trainers will modify them on the fly to fit the audience, the way the class is flowing today, and their own personality. Keeping them from making edits likely won't gain anything.
Admittedly, I come from an academic background, but in general, SMEs probably have more important things to do. By important, I mean tasks that only they can perform. It makes sense to prioritize tasks on the basis of the expertise need to perform them. Then assign the available personnel to the highest level task they are qualified for. For example, anyone can change a "." to a "?" at the end of a quiz question, but not everyone can create valid quiz questions.
To me, the important considerations are: Is this person capable of this, and is it the best use of our resources.
Thanks, Judy! I appreciate you taking the time to reply. Having seen what happens when non IDs get into Articulate files, I don't like the idea at all, but I wanted to put it out here in case there is a different perspective I'm missing. For me personally collecting feedback in the Word file where changes can be tracked and comments made by all parties is best as you can see everything in one file and have documentation of changes.
Thanks, Walt! Yes, they are talking about this as a possibility for established courses. However, a simple edit could mean having to render the audio again and then impact the timing of any animation. We also use one master course to publish out different versions so there are other layers to care for as well.
To me it's not as simple as it might seem. Not everyone has a good eye for detail, and that is a "must have" skill in my book.
In the past when they did this, we ended up with bullets on the slides that in no way supported the audio content from the notes; slides with slide notes that really were 2-3 slides worth of content but just crammed onto one slide (and all read out in the audio); animation was stripped out, and there were few if any interactive slides since those can be more complex (which are necessary for OnDemand courses in my opinion). It was a lot of work to go back and fix things.
Wow, some great feedback. Now for a totally different perspective. I work with 5 other e-learning developers. We are the SME for what we are developing. It may be web classes or ILT classes. We have are all non-instructional designers. We have very little to no development background. Most of us turned wrenches most of our lives.
BUT, we develop classes and they fit our companies needs. We use WORD to review our writing. We look at each other’s work and make comments using Review. I think both Judy and Walt have some very good points and comments.
My opinion for what it is worth, you need to look at your companies stack holders needs and are they being meet. Are the people reviewing and commenting making good useful comments that are improving content. I see comments based on “I don’t like the color” personal issues that don’t improve the project. Good people are hard to find and even harder to keep these days. If you find good people that are helping keep doing what you are doing. If you are, as said trying to just move stuff along, get projects off someone’s plate, you need to rethink your process. Training is changing faster than we can keep up. As younger people are entering the job market the way the learn has changed. The mind stays the same and general ideas may still be the same, but they don’t want to sit in a class, they want to grad a quick class to do something and move on.
I’ve rambled enough. Just remember as the world will still turn tomorrow, change will happen at a faster pace. Don’t judge the book by it’s cover. And you can fix a wrong decision, but you can’t fix no decision. Give things a try, if they don’t work, stop and make a change.
Thank you so much for the response. I think the Word document feedback has worked well - at least in my previous company it worked well. So far here I think it has worked well too. The issue is trying to shorten the time to update the content with only a couple of IDs. I think it's difficult to make eLearning agile - at least traditional eLearning like we are doing.
Another big issues is that there is a lot of things on the back end that would need sped up as well (the product development teams) in order to make eL more agile. For example, at a minimum we'd need the release notes 30 days prior to a release. My previous experience has been that product development teams trying to work agile tend to work down to the wire and not want to commit definitively to an enhancement going in the release until the last minute. So sometimes 30 days advance release notes were updated to 15 days or 10 days or even 5 days advanced release notes which made it difficult to update training by 1 day post prod to be agile.
I prefer receiving feedback in Articulate Review, then doing the edits myself. I don't see any pros in letting people who are not experts with both instructional design and eLearning development edit Articulate files, either in Rise or Storyline.
Thanks for the feedback! That's where I'm at as well, (struggling to see any pros letting people who aren't IDs and eLearning developers make edits) but trying to see if others see it differently since I was asked to keep an open mind. Currently we use the Word version for initial content edits for a release, and then the ID then makes the edits in the course files and publishes it to Articulate 360. The SME then takes a final walk through in Articulate 360 to make any additional comments before the ID then makes the final round of edits. I think it works pretty well that way.
8 Replies
I've never heard of anyone having trainers or SMEs do simple edits in courses.
The main drawback: They'd need to have an Articulate license, which would be a big expense for this small contribution.
They'd need enough training on the software to be able to access all the text. For example, some objects might have extra text within States, which aren't visible when just looking at the slide in edit mode.
There's also the possibility that they'd accidentally click something that would cause problems, e.g., hide an object or turn off a trigger.
An alternative might be to use the Translation feature to export the text to Word. Have them edit the Word file, and then import it back into the project.
Bottom line: Personally, I think it's easiest to just collect feedback--even about simple edits--and have a developer enter them.
For decades, centuries, even, colleges and universities have subscribed to the idea that the main determiner of academic success is the subject expertise of the teacher. In very recent times, most of them have come to the realization that teaching ability has as much, or more effect on how learners learn. Rather than taking on the very daunting task of training their professors (some of whom already are very skilled teachers) to teach, they have brought a new class of helper alongside them. That's where the concept of ID's came from. They are the teaching and curriculum experts. (Coincidently, that's why landscape, graphic, bridge, and other designers are not good choices for designing instruction.) Business is way ahead of academia in discovering and implementing this.
With that as background, I'm going to make a bunch of assumptions about your questions, and try to answer them. It sounds to me like you have courses that have been through the design stage, and are aligned with the curriculum, storyboarded, through the initial stage of development, and in the hands of the e-authoring or development crew. Also assuming you have considered and solved Judy's concerns about licensing and SL ability.Those people typically have a backlog of several months or more, and you are looking to ease their load, specifically with spelling, grammar, phrasing, quality assurance, and other post-design tasks - tasks that almost anybody in your organization can do, especially if the edits are laid out for them. It is a given that no matter what their title, all of your people will differ in their level of design, authoring, teaching, communication, grammar, and spelling skills. Some will be better than others. That may be the starting point for your decision.
Know first, that if these are either in-person or hybrid classes, the trainers will modify them on the fly to fit the audience, the way the class is flowing today, and their own personality. Keeping them from making edits likely won't gain anything.
Admittedly, I come from an academic background, but in general, SMEs probably have more important things to do. By important, I mean tasks that only they can perform. It makes sense to prioritize tasks on the basis of the expertise need to perform them. Then assign the available personnel to the highest level task they are qualified for. For example, anyone can change a "." to a "?" at the end of a quiz question, but not everyone can create valid quiz questions.
To me, the important considerations are: Is this person capable of this, and is it the best use of our resources.
Thanks, Judy! I appreciate you taking the time to reply. Having seen what happens when non IDs get into Articulate files, I don't like the idea at all, but I wanted to put it out here in case there is a different perspective I'm missing. For me personally collecting feedback in the Word file where changes can be tracked and comments made by all parties is best as you can see everything in one file and have documentation of changes.
Thanks, Walt! Yes, they are talking about this as a possibility for established courses. However, a simple edit could mean having to render the audio again and then impact the timing of any animation. We also use one master course to publish out different versions so there are other layers to care for as well.
To me it's not as simple as it might seem. Not everyone has a good eye for detail, and that is a "must have" skill in my book.
In the past when they did this, we ended up with bullets on the slides that in no way supported the audio content from the notes; slides with slide notes that really were 2-3 slides worth of content but just crammed onto one slide (and all read out in the audio); animation was stripped out, and there were few if any interactive slides since those can be more complex (which are necessary for OnDemand courses in my opinion). It was a lot of work to go back and fix things.
Wow, some great feedback. Now for a totally different perspective. I work with 5 other e-learning developers. We are the SME for what we are developing. It may be web classes or ILT classes. We have are all non-instructional designers. We have very little to no development background. Most of us turned wrenches most of our lives.
BUT, we develop classes and they fit our companies needs. We use WORD to review our writing. We look at each other’s work and make comments using Review. I think both Judy and Walt have some very good points and comments.
My opinion for what it is worth, you need to look at your companies stack holders needs and are they being meet. Are the people reviewing and commenting making good useful comments that are improving content. I see comments based on “I don’t like the color” personal issues that don’t improve the project. Good people are hard to find and even harder to keep these days. If you find good people that are helping keep doing what you are doing. If you are, as said trying to just move stuff along, get projects off someone’s plate, you need to rethink your process. Training is changing faster than we can keep up. As younger people are entering the job market the way the learn has changed. The mind stays the same and general ideas may still be the same, but they don’t want to sit in a class, they want to grad a quick class to do something and move on.
I’ve rambled enough. Just remember as the world will still turn tomorrow, change will happen at a faster pace. Don’t judge the book by it’s cover. And you can fix a wrong decision, but you can’t fix no decision. Give things a try, if they don’t work, stop and make a change.
Good luck
Hi Eric!
Thank you so much for the response. I think the Word document feedback has worked well - at least in my previous company it worked well. So far here I think it has worked well too. The issue is trying to shorten the time to update the content with only a couple of IDs. I think it's difficult to make eLearning agile - at least traditional eLearning like we are doing.
Another big issues is that there is a lot of things on the back end that would need sped up as well (the product development teams) in order to make eL more agile. For example, at a minimum we'd need the release notes 30 days prior to a release. My previous experience has been that product development teams trying to work agile tend to work down to the wire and not want to commit definitively to an enhancement going in the release until the last minute. So sometimes 30 days advance release notes were updated to 15 days or 10 days or even 5 days advanced release notes which made it difficult to update training by 1 day post prod to be agile.
I prefer receiving feedback in Articulate Review, then doing the edits myself. I don't see any pros in letting people who are not experts with both instructional design and eLearning development edit Articulate files, either in Rise or Storyline.
Hi Tracy!
Thanks for the feedback! That's where I'm at as well, (struggling to see any pros letting people who aren't IDs and eLearning developers make edits) but trying to see if others see it differently since I was asked to keep an open mind. Currently we use the Word version for initial content edits for a release, and then the ID then makes the edits in the course files and publishes it to Articulate 360. The SME then takes a final walk through in Articulate 360 to make any additional comments before the ID then makes the final round of edits. I think it works pretty well that way.