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Go Tell It on the Mountain
One of the most interesting aspects of working to develop learning content is the varied personalities, experiences, and outlooks of your colleagues. Whether you primarily develop for an educational institution, a corporate entity or as a consultant, you can expect extremely different personalities and outlooks on your team. This makes sense if we stop to consider that the creation, distribution, and consumption of learning material require the effort from many different sources. However, all of these different stakeholders should have the following mediating concepts in common: 1) an understanding of the primary business objective; 2) an understanding of the learning objective; 3) an understanding of the needs of the audience; and 4) an understanding of the resources available.
Unfortunately, it has been my experience that most stakeholders have an understanding of, at most, two of these concepts at any one time. Even more unfortunate is the likelihood that the members of your development team or even your managers fall into this group, and how certain they are that their outlook is the most correct one.
In technical or procedure-dominated fields, there is a concept known as a “Religious Debate.” This is when individuals engage in pointless arguments over a preferred way of doing something, irrespective of the distinguishing facts of the situation at hand. This happens within the ranks of Instructional Designers as well. Sometimes it is actually a quest to gain insight into a process, but it is usually merely an attempt to assert one person's comfortable understanding or skill-set onto a process, whether it fits or not.
Recently, I had the manager of a project on which I was working state that the screen shots were of too low a quality and that from then onward, image collection would precede all other phases of development and that there would be no loss of quality in the screen shots allowed for the program.
Now, I could smell an artistic Religious Debate heating up, as the manager had already intimated that the visual appearance of programs indicated the quality of their content, and I really tried not to appear as a heretic, but I had to ask a few annoying questions that I knew would put me in hot water:
- Who has indicated that this is necessary?
- Is there some data to show that this change will improve content for the learners?
- How will this impact development resources and procedures?
- How exactly does one represent a screen shot that is 1024x768 pixels in size in a constrained size of 800x600 pixels without a loss of quality?
Needless to say, the answers to these questions were less than satisfactory. My favorite was to number four, in which the answer was “That is for you to determine.” So I did.
Remember, as a content developer, you always have a tool at your disposal that is far stronger than any religious ethos: the time projection based upon verifiable procedures. The discussion changed from a Religious Debate into a productive discussion once this manager realized that the work-hours needed to completely re-draw the screen shot into the new size in order to achieve this quality objective as well as the missteps resulting from changing the development procedure completely over-extended her allotted budget.
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