Questions from a newbie

Hi Jamie!

Welcome to the community and thanks for posting your questions here in the forum! Those are some great topics, and ones that have been touched on this past! I thought I would share some links to past forum discussions on these topics to help you find out what people have to say about these specific questions....

1.  Here are some links to some past forum discussions about what skill set one needs to be successful:

• What skillset would your dream e-learning team have?
• What does the future Instructional Designer need to know?
• Looking for Instructional Design exprience

2. Past discussions on the future of e-learning development and if it is a sustainable industry:

• The future of e-learning development
• Future of e-learning authoring tools: where are things headed?

3. Forum discussions on payment/how much you to charge for e-learning development:

• E-learning salaries and annual reviews
• Whats the going rate for freelance work?
• Contract or Permanent: What is the UK Market Like?

Hope some of these links can help you out and provide you with some valuable information!! =)

Hi Jamie,

Welcome to the community! You’re sure to get a lot of responses with your questions here! In addition to the links Nicole posted, here are some of my thoughts…

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Question 1: You're right about the project management and consulting stuff – these skills are key to keep your “business” running smoothly. As I’ve worked, both as a freelancer and in the corporate environment, I’ve never considered myself as simply a “do-er.” What I mean by this, is that many of your clients aren’t going to know what they want until you show it to them. So consider yourself as a solutions-provider, not just someone who just does what they’re told. You have to act as a consultant.

Also, I would say that programming skills may not be as much of a necessity as they may have been in the past. A lot of what you can do in Storyline (variables, etc.) used to require some sort of programming knowledge – but now you can do it with a few clicks of a mouse. Depending on the complexity of what you’re designing, you may not need any programming knowledge at all. For me, I have a very successful freelance business and I know NOTHING about programming. It’s never been an issue for me.

And yes, graphic design skills are very important. This is one area where you can be very successful if you can do this yourself. eLearning is a visual communications tool – so it’s important to have a skillset with graphic design. I use Adobe Illustrator for a lot of what I do – which is not that hard to learn at all – BUT, you can do a lot with the tools in PowerPoint and Storyline.

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Question 2: As for eLearning being a glorified and interactive PPT, you may be right. It really depends on who you look at it. When I first started out in eLearning and was using Articulate Studio ’09, I had a hard time conditioning myself to stop using PPT as if I were creating a PPT presentation. You have to change how you view it. Try thinking of PPT as simply a graphics and animations tool.

As for long term sustainability of using PPT – I have to say, take a look at Storyline. It’s stands on it’s own, but uses similar tools nonetheless.

Also, in regarding to “mentors guiding people” – I think you’ll find that no one here would suggest that eLearning is the be-all and end-all solution for training. eLearning is just another tool which can be used to enhance the blended learning approach. I’d never suggest for an organization to solely use eLearning as their only training option. However, you will also notice, in the LMS field, a lot more features are being implemented which allow for social media-like interaction.

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Question 3: Pay is a hard thing to define. In the corporate world, you’ll see two people doing the exact some work, with one making $40K/yr. and the other making $80K/yr. For large organizations, it really depends on your experience, how much they value that particulate field, and how well you negotiate (to list a few).

As for freelancing – again, it depends on your experience, your body of work, how complicated the project is, the timeline of the project, how desperate the client is, and how comfortable you feel justifying what you’re asking for. I’ve seen freelancer eLearning designers as low as $35/hr. and as high as $80/hr.

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I hope this gives you some good info. Sorry for writing a novel!

Tim

Hi again Jamie,

Posting on the E-Learning Heroes website is very useful.

Those links are really useful Nicole and thanks for the feedback to Jamie's questions Tim.

It's nice to see things from a UK perspective.

Nicholas

Thank you very much for your helpful answers everyone! There is a lot of useful information on this forum, very useful for someone like me figuring out how to start out.

One other question I'd like to ask is what are your opinions on using Tumult Hype 2 for developing E-Learning content? I'm reasonably familiar with it and find the possibilities to be somewhat endless. Are there any limitations to using Hype 2 as a E-Learning development tool?

Thanks again,

Jamie