What's the WORST elearning advice you ever received?
Jan 13, 2016
A few weeks ago, I came across David's post titled, "What's the BEST elearning advice you ever received?" I thought it might be fun to look at this question from another perspective. The old saying, "You learn more from your mistakes than you ever learn from getting it right" seems to fit here.
Here is mine to get this discussion started:
When I first started designing and delivering e-Learning, I was advised by another person (no one from our community by the way) that for very simple jobs, don't bother writing a Statement of Work (SOW).
I took that advice on one of my first projects, a simple one that was estimated to take 2-3 days to complete. Unfortunately, the project experienced scope creep and before I knew it, expanded to 2-3 weeks. Without a signed Statement of Work (SOW) to go back to the client with and show the requested tasks were not in our original agreement, it became a "he said/she said" situation. I wrapped up the project as quickly as I could but at a loss!
Lesson learned? ALWAYS, no matter how simple your next e-Learning project appears to be, GET THE AGREEMENT IN WRITING and SIGNED by BOTH parties before starting a project.
What about you? What is the WORST elearning advice you ever received?
51 Replies
use more bullet points
John,
You know for some people, you can never have enough bullet points! :)
Richard
It doesn't matter how long an eLearning module is. 40+ minutes will be fine.
Oh man, definitely this
Not really advice, but I often get we want "wow" with no explanation or understanding what "wow" is.
Dragging this out takes time and energy.
"I don't know what is wrong with it but change it." Not even which slide she didn't like. When I questioned her she continued with, "Just change it."
Phil,
Yes! Sometimes "WoW" is text and images flying, fading, spinning and growing. Another situation that takes time and energy away from producing good content.
Cary,
Agreed. I think that is one of the hardest and most frustrating situations to be in.
"No it can't be a resource or offline work, every word has to be on the slides so we know they read it"
This was for a 200-ish page tome on specific governance standards for banking.
Almost every bit of advice I've received about elearning has been bad, but the worst advice is that you have to design for the botton 10 % - those users who cannot figure out how to click the "next" button. Not that I am promoting the use of a next button but hopefully you get what I mean.
"Can you just combine those three courses into one. No it won't matter if the users have to spend 2 hours in one package...."
Tony and Bob
Ah, yes. The "everything is important" syndrome. "They must know ALL of this so we can't leave anything out."
Richard
Nancy, when I used to teach Microsoft engineering courses, that was always a challenge. If you had a room of 25 people, with varying levels of skills/knowledge, what do you do?
1. Teach to the lowest common denominator
2. Teach to the objectives
3. Teach everyone to their specific level
When teaching, I always took the approach of teaching to the objectives while helping individuals where I could on breaks. At least e-learning provides some opportunities to cater to different levels (e.g., adding resources for additional reading, allowing the user to skip some content, etc.). :)
Richard
A client once justified locking a course down with the comment
"I have written this and they will read it"
Along the same lines as Nancy, the worst advice I ever got was from a former training manager who told me that I should assume our audience couldn't handle clicking, listening, or reading.
Her advice? Use narration to put all of the text on the screen and read every word of it to learners. She also insisted that we auto-advance the slides and make every quiz T/F so it would be "stupid-easy" for people to pass. It was disheartening to say the least...
Final note: Jane Bozarth's Nuts & Bolts article on Blaming the Learner really resonated with me on this point so give that a read if you've gotten this piece of advice, too!
I don't that it was necessarily advice, but a common request I have had in the past was, "Just record the presentation on the video camera and throw it on the LMS."
"Could I have different background colors in different pages?"
"Why?"
"I think it will be more interesting if every page has different color. "
And thanks god, I'd successfully convinced my client not to do so.
"Audio quality doesn't matter"
That's when you start whispering everything you say from that point on.
I feel like this could be a fun challenge. I.E. See if it could be done tastefully ;)
I've heard the same thing! My response: So you want me to cater to the 10% and lose the rest of the group to boredom? I don't like those odds...
Have each slide just slightly different, so you can barely tell, yet by the time you get to the last slide its a completely different color than the 1st slide.
Copy the text from PPT as it is. It’s been written and reviewed by best of our SMEs and they don’t want to see or review any change in the text.
Miranda, that was a law course.
Mine was more of a question from a boss, "how can they learn without bullet points?" Unfortunately, I (nor anyone) was able to convince them of other visual options.
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