Hybrid Content Development

Creating courses becomes a joint effort of customer and supplier

Wouldn’t it be nice, as an experienced e-Learning developer, to be absolutely free in developing e-Learning courses using flash? Wouldn’t it be nice, as a non-technical subject matter expert, to just add your knowledge to a course without programming? In a time where everybody is looking for cost reductions, people look more critical at what they do and get more efficient. The same goes for developing e-Learning content.

In our network of partners and customers we see a major shift towards what we call: Hybrid Content Development. The development of a course becomes a joint effort between the customer and supplier. The company that has the actual knowledge and wishes to distribute it using e-Learning, and a specialized company delivering design, interaction and didactic skills.

Where is this general shift coming from? Maybe it is that the people who purchase the software don’t want to make the decision (yet) about to what extend they will develop the courses by themselves or let an experienced content producer do it. Making use of online tools in a shared environment, this decision is not necessary anymore since at any time people can join the project team. The decision can be changed at any moment without any pain.

Even the more interactive parts of a course can be edited. With the software products of today it is not necessary anymore to be a flash developer to create engaging e-Learning. With user-friendly editors it is possible to change most of the variables within a flash. Everybody can work together in one central environment in its own role. The professional course developers can focus fully on their added value by designing the initial flashes and open these through dialogue boxes to the subject matter expert. And a subject matter expert can, at all times, add or edit knowledge distributed in the course.

A downside of developing e-Learning with flash used to be that the behavior of the learner could not be tracked within a flash using SCORM, so in the end, the LMS did not know the results of the course. But with the latest developments in the 4^th edition of SCORM 2004 it is possible, but that doesn’t solve the problem in developing and maintaining the flash. Some tool producers even close that gap so that it will be possible to use the SCORM standards in any thinkable flash interaction.

We think this will be a growing trend, the technology becomes easier to use and cheaper at the same time. This fact together with the growing demand of companies to have control on who develops what will force the industry to take this in account for the future. This will give a lot of chances also, everybody can specialize and that increases the value a lot.

The same trend was in Web Content Management a few years ago. At first there was no CMS, a website was hardcoded, during time it became easier to edit, but the extend of editing today is much higher than with the earliest content management systems. However, the real internet specialists are still important, they bring their value in search engine optimalization, overall design, special requirements etc. This trend for e-Learning was already coming up with the use of the early authoring tools, but was brought in to high speed because of the economical changes. E-Learning service providers will definitely keep delivering value to their customers but more and more it will be a joint effort.