Creating On-line Learning
Progressive Prototyping for Online Learning Development
Online learning products are often anticipated to have some advanced media implementations in them such as video, animations, interactions or simulations. The difficult aspect when including these pieces of a product is that they require increasing amounts of resources and planning in a project arena that typically tries to reduce the planning phases as much as possible.
In the development of a complex piece of media, it would make sense to have a detailed project and product plan for determining a resource budget. Yet, resource allocation for planing and developing these 'nice to have' additions often lags until it is too late to properly implement a plan to make an effective representation. What often happens is either the complex media is developed only partially and does not meet expectations, or development is abandoned due to budget constraints late in the project.
Think about the stages in which a complex piece of media should be developed:
- Identify the need or opportunity
- Identify the scope of the media
- Identify necessary resources
- Determine placement in project plan and relevant milestones
- Assign budget to develop
- Develop media prototype
- Evaluate media prototype and refine plan
- Design full media piece and implement
- Assess results for impact of media in learning content
It is unlikely that these steps are properly followed in all production situations for online education. Instead, the media is often a nascent idea at the typical compressed development planning stages that is only prototyped to show the plausibility of the effort.
A typical compressed planning situation might go like this:
SME: “We need to show how this works more clearly.”
Project Lead: “I'll ask the media development team what they can do.”
Media Developer: “I could make a mock-up of how something could look.”
Project Lead: “Good. I'll get the specifications from the SME and you can verify your work with them.”
--Later--
Media Developer: “We finished the prototype.”
Project Lead: “Good, but we had a change in project scope and it needs to go live sooner than expected. Can we use this immediately?”
Media Developer: “Uh, no. It is just a prototype. It needs more polish to be presentable.”
Project Lead: “Well, that goes in the wasted effort pile.”
When you are planning and designing an online learning product, it is important to plan to develop complex media in stages so that, even if the scope changes, your project will not be wasting effort building and discarding prototypes. The project lead should always have a risk mitigation strategy when investing the amount of resources necessary for a complex piece of media. Since it is the content that is most important in educational material, the prototypes of each complex video, animation, interaction or simulation should be usable at each stage of their development, in order to reduce the risk of wasted resources.
Using this strategy might not produce a masterpiece of media for each learning product, but it will improve the likelihood of using the media, despite resulting changes to the scope of the project or lack of resources for the learning product.
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