DevLearn 2007 Recap

The following is a recap of the various sessions I made it around to at DevLearn.

Day 1: Tuesday

Breakfast bytes:
Management: Challenges, Ideas and Best Practices
This discussion group turned out to be a bit of a bust. I'm not sure what happened, but our instructors seemed to think that the small group size and room arrangement was not condusive to having discussions. They tried to release us to other morning discussions, but most of us hung around to see what could be salvaged. Somehow we ended up dancing around the topic of "what is eLearning really?" My takeaway was that eLearning will probably mean different things to different people, so I should use more specific terms like "web-based-training" or "interactive multimedia presentation."

Session 1:
The 10 Most Common Reasons eLearning Projects Fail and What To Do
For some reason the common reasons listed in my notes don't add up to 10. From my count I have 8 problems and 9 solutions, so either I got lost deep in thought at some point or maybe "top 10" was just catchier. Either way, here is what I have:

The eLearning Solution Challenge
1. Poor quality courses
2. Underestimated infrastructure challenges
3. End-user not motivated and incentives not clear
4. Dependency on a single solution approach
5. Culture doesn't support it
6. Resistance from instructors and administrators being forced from their zones
7. Subject matter unavailability
8. Attending training sessions is considered a perk

What we can do:
1. Conduct an eLearning study
2. Better define your training goals
3. Develop cost of ownership projections - understand that content maintenance increases over time
4. Build schedules that assume SME delays
5. Identify potential attrition problems and implement solutions
6. Focus on transfer of learning to the job - Learners typically forget what they learn over time
7. Don't put too much into a course - Build a workable course that includes support tools
8. Design courses to engage learners
9. Leverage the community

Session 2
Scalable and Repeatable Training Development: Processes, Tools, and...
Another wonderful session. This session focused on how to rapidly create quality eLearning products with a dispersed workforce. This topic was of particular interest to me since our production teams have been asked to do this for years, but the push back has always been that you can't plan that way when everything we do is a custom job. This session gave some examples of how Accenture has done just that, making almost an assembly-line of custom eLearning.

The 7 secrets to success mentioned were:
1. Maintain focus on business alignment and business results
2. Establish and clearly use entry criteria
3. Clearly define and communicate roles and responsibilities
4. Leverage predictable factory efficiences
5. Adopt an integrated development platform
6. Implement estimating, planning, and activity tracking tools
7. Leverage a web-enabled process and methodology

Session 3:
Ensuring Quality and Consistency of eLearning by Using Standards
This session was also a demonstration of what one company is doing to rapidly create eLearning. The speaker also discussed using templates, as was mentioned in Session 2, but this speaker did one better; he actually had stacks of them printed out! While the show and tell was interesting, I think what kept everyone there to the end was the fact that he was giving away templates.

Wow, my brief recap took me longer than expected. I am going to have to work on Days 2 and 3 another time. I hope some of this was useful to any readers that missed these sessions.