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How Much Time Should I Estimate For eLearning Course Development?

12/10/2019

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How Long Does It Take to Design an eLearning Course?

​Planning to develop an eLearning course? Then you’ll want to know how much time it will take. The answer: It depends. eLearning courses range in duration (how long it takes a typical learner to complete) as well as development hours. 

Do you know how much time and effort your organization spends on a typical, 30-minute eLearning course build? Depending on the level of interactivity and custom engagement, your project infrastructure and more, developing a new course can take anywhere (truthfully), from 20 to 200 hours.
How long it’s taken me to build eLearning courses:
  • My shortest turnaround time to develop, test and publish an eLearning course was one week. It was a simple Occupational Health and Safety lockdown procedure built in Articulate Rise for a head office that took one week of 0.75 full-time work. Essentially, learners spend 15 minutes completing a course that took me (and a few hours of the SME’s time) approximately 26-30 hours.
  • The longest development time for any project I’ve worked on was 16 months. I helped prepare the first storyboard draft of the very first online course for health care providers for a non-profit organization. That’s almost a year and a half of 0.5 full-time work. Yikes! It was built to be a minimum of 4-6 hours of learning time, around 800+ hours of my time alone.
All other projects in between varied widely in development time too, based on these common factors:
  • Preparedness and availability of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), as well as the number of SMEs involved (The more SMEs, the longer development takes)
  • Complexity of content
  • Complexity of engagement activities
  • Flexibility of the tool used to author the course, combined with the experience and skill of the course developers themselves
  • State of content (approved and static versus in discussion and dynamic)
Pro tip: The biggest mistake most organizations make is desiring a highly interactive course, but underestimating how long it takes to develop. Create your estimates on evidence-based resources such research from the Chapman Alliance. Be wary of internal teams or contractors that can promise you a complex course in a tighter timeline—chances are the project won’t be on time or budget, and might not be what you hoped for. 
This is why I recommend starting with a small scoping project to test if your budget, project plan, or contractor-client relationship are aligned. 
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Hiring a Learning Consultant? Test the waters with a scoping contract

11/12/2019

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Test the waters with elearning consultant

Hiring a Learning Consultant? Test the Waters with a Scoping Contract

Hiring a consultant you’ve never worked with before is a big commitment. You want to be confident you’re getting the right Instructional Designer or Learning Consultant for the job and the best fit for your organization. That’s why I recommend asking your contractor to complete a scoping or small prototyping project first—it’s a great way to test the waters for both parties.
Some recent scoping examples
I’ve had the chance to scope out small, medium and large-scale learning projects, ranging from a few hours of LMS administrator training for a non-profit group, to a company-wide data privacy training strategy for a national airline carrier. One all-employee eLearning program took 10 hours to scope and estimate, based on the amount of existing content available at the time. For a healthcare provider instructor-led coaching program, a few hours of scoping was adequate.

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In each situation, prototyping or conducting a trial project was helpful for both me and the client to make more accurate estimates and feel confident about working together on a larger project plan.
What does a learning or training scoping project look like?
Typically, the scoping quotations I offer include the following:
  • A training needs analysis: An interview that answers the big project questions and your requirements. Here are some of the questions I ask in the needs analysis phase.
  • Content discovery: A dedicated period to peruse, read and explore existing content. This often allows me to identify any content gaps before a project starts, too. (This will save you even more time and effort.)
  • A detailed estimate: Includes estimates of time and effort for my consultant hours as well as resource estimates for internal resources. This is a bonus for your budget planning—not all consultants provide this!)
  • Signing of any None Disclosure Agreement (NDA) or contract language: Protects your content or intellectual property.
  • A draft workback schedule or high-level timelines and project milestones: This will be our collaborative road-map to prepare for due dates, incoming work, and to block off time in calendars (both for me and your team)
  • A detailed list of recommended deliverables: Often includes tiered options (basic, mid-range, advanced) and the pros/cons of each tier.
Benefits of scoping projects for organizations
​Not sure if your timeline and estimates are realistic or how much your complete project might cost? Engage a learning strategist or instructional design contractor for a few hours to scope it out with (or for) you. It’s easier to secure a small budget for a scoping project or a prototype or draft learning build than for the entire project at once.
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Consultants are well-versed at drafting proposals and estimating hours and effort. If you’re struggling with putting this together, or simply want to confirm your estimates with the person who may execute the project, ask the consultant to provide a quote

This not only gives you a chance to see how you and the consultant work together, but it gives both parties a chance to confirm the project plan before diving in.
Benefits of scoping projects for consultants
A trial project allows me to get to know the client and their content. For example, the degree of flexibility and responsiveness about a group can say a lot, and increase the enjoyment of working together too. As much as possible I choose clients that commit to predetermined turnaround times to provide their feedback so that my work isn’t held up.
​After I’ve completed a scoping project, it’s often much faster to start on the actual work, because we’ve already confirmed the finer details of the contract language, payment, and communication channels and frequency, so we can just dive in.
Pro tips:
  1. ​If you like the direction things are going, start securing your budget for the actual work before the scoping project ends. Projects stall when there are gaps between scoping and kicking off the actual project. To keep the momentum going, secure the overall project budget and contractor resources before the scoping project is over. You should already have a pretty good idea half-way into the scoping project if you and the consultant are a good match.​​​​

  2. ​​If you hire them again, be sure to share what you’d like to see more of, and what you’d like to see less of. A professional contractor will always be open to feedback, whether you hire them or not for the full project. Here are five more tips for hiring the right consultant.
Do you have a project that would benefit from a consultant’s perspective? 
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Ask, Don't Tell: Tips for working with instructional designers

4/9/2019

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3 Tips for Working Effectively with Instructional Designers

Learning consultants tend to hear these a lot:
We want an eLearning course.”
“I want a Storyline module.”
“We need you to build a quiz.”
“I want a video.”
“Can you do a webinar for us?”
I suspect that this is one of the top three pet peeves of all instructional designers out there: Many clients and businesses reach out to us asking for a specific deliverable. You've already decided on the learning delivery and format. If you’ve done this before, you were probably on the right track. You know your audience and your needs, and you’ve likely already conducted your own needs analysis or done some requirement gathering.
 
Often though, by asking for a specific delivery method, you may be selling yourself short. You may not be requesting the most appropriate learning to meet your objective. Instead, work with your learning consultant to explore whether better options exist. It’s their job to make recommendations.

Selecting the most appropriate delivery method for learning really depends on a variety of factors:
 
1. Needs analysis—what problem should the learning solve?
 
An important component of instructional designers’ work is a needs analysis. This consists of weighing the project goals, requirements, audience characteristics, and then recommending n the most effective delivery method.
 
Here are some of the questions I like to ask my clients before I recommend which learning deliverable will provide optimal outcomes:
  • What problem will this learning solve? What learner behaviour do you want to change with this course/event?
  • Tell me about your audience (skills, characteristics, openness to change, etc.). How will this learning potentially impact them (positively/negatively)?
  • How can this learning request meet your business or organizational goals?
  • Which delivery methods have worked well in the past and why? Are you open to other delivery methods if they could be more effective?
  • What constraints are we working within (geography, cost, time, etc.)?
 
At the end of the needs analysis phase, your instructional designer can recommend the delivery model that will be most effective for the audience, objectives, topic and existing platforms.
 
2. Learning tools inventory—what tools do you already have and use, and how relevant are they for delivering the learning?
 
Next, I take inventory of what tools and systems the organization I’m working with has at their disposal. This is especially important for blended learning requests. The project deliverable has to work within these, or the scope of the project needs to expand. For example, it doesn’t make sense to ask for an eLearning course (i.e., this usually means a SCORM file or Shareable Content Object Reference Model) without having a learning management system or learning experience platform to host, play, deliver and track SCORM-built learning.
 
In most cases, organizations already have excellent delivery tools and systems already in-house that learning consultants will leverage. For example, if your organization uses a video conferencing tool like GoToMeeting, Zoom or MeetMe, then you have a platform to deliver virtual instructor-led training like webinars or mini virtual coaching sessions.
 
3. Constraints—what’s your budget and when does the training have to be delivered?
 
Sometimes our best and most creative ideas are born in the most constrained and rigid settings. An experienced instructional designer will not only do a thorough needs analysis and look at your existing tools, they should also respect your budget and other logistical and operational requirements.
 
Working with subject matter experts from every department in the company might seem like a good idea until you crunch the numbers and realize that would negatively impact front-line resources.
 
Similarly, requesting a 5-day train-the-trainer program doesn’t make sense if the organization doesn’t have the travel budget or travel time to allocate for in-person training. Your learning consultant will take these things into consideration when recommending the delivery method that works best for your organization.

So, before you contact an eLearning consultant to “build a 15-slide eLearning course”, be open to working with them to select the best deliverable for your objective. It’s more effective to outline your goal and budget and let your consultant work within these parameters. Let us Instructional Designers recommend the deliverables that best match your training objectives and you’ll get more bang for your buck!

  • Hiring tip: To get the most out of your learning consultant, ask them how they’ll weigh their needs analysis, learning tools inventory and constraints before asking them what learning delivery method they would recommend for your project. In many cases, they can make a number of recommendations based on all three to ensure your project’s success. Read more tips on how to hire the right learning consultant.
 
If you’re reading this post and want to hear more about some of the recommendations I’ve made for my clients, don't hesitate to get in touch!
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    Author

    Leah Chang is a learning consultant with 17+ years of experience designing online and classroom learning. In her spare time she goes on self-propelled travel adventures and tries to grow vegetables. 

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