Three tiers in the content pyramid

Back in December I posted about what I predicted would become e-learning's two tiers. To remind you:

High end

The top tier would be e-learning that delivers something special, something that can't be achieved easily other ways. This tier would be reserved for projects with complex and/or high impact objectives, sensible lead times and appropriately generous budgets. These projects would require the care and attention of professionals, typically working as teams of specialists.

You would expect e-learning content at this higher level to include a degree of intelligence or personalisation, and/or challenging scenarios using rich media, and/or simulations with high functional fidelity, and/or elements of game play, and/or 3D models of interesting objects that can be manipulated and explored, and/or virtual worlds with high physical fidelity.

(Several colleagues, notably Lars Hyland and Nick Shackleton-Jones, prompted me to re-think this list of examples. They felt that you didn't have to be doing leading-edge work to be at the high end, you could be generating what is relatively simple content, but with great care and professionalism. I agree with them.)

Because of its cost, high end content is almost always going to be a top-down learning intervention, created at the initiative of an organisation's management.

Rapid development

The lower tier would be 'good enough' digital content, designed to communicate simple information or provide basic knowledge without fuss. The form may be a simple interactive tutorial, a short video, a podcast, a screen capture movie, a PowerPoint or a PDF. This content may be designed and developed in-house, by subject experts or generalist trainers, or outside by a new breed of rapid developers. The turnaround time could be anything from a few hours to a few weeks, and the cost is likely to be well under $10K.

Rapid development of this sort could result from a top-down management initiative, but it could also be created from the bottom-up, on the initiative of subject experts who are empowered with the tools, the time, the skills and the authority.

Social learning technologies

Where my two-tier model failed was in the fact that it did not properly integrate with more recent developments in using web 2.0 tools for informal learning. Enter Nick Shackleton-Jones, Manager, Online & Informal Learning for the BBC. Nick's model, shown above, which he presented at a recent eLearning Network event on rapid e-learning, consists of a pyramid with three tiers. As you descend the pyramid, the volume of each tier increases, so you would expect there to be far more user-generated content than rapid development, and far more rapid development than high end content. This may not be the case now - and Nick admitted that at the BBC there is not yet a great deal of user-generated content - but that it what the model is implying for the future, certainly for those organisations employing substantial numbers of knowledge workers.

Content generated using social learning technologies such as wikis, forums, blogs and the like, is an entirely bottom-up initiative. It occurs because managers are not the only ones with an interest in learning and performance improvement - it is to every individual's advantage that they have the knowledge and skills necessary to carry out their current jobs effectively, to take advantage of opportunities for advancement and to remain competitive in the marketplace.

This is not a competition

High end, rapid and user-generated content are not in competition with each other, any more than Hollywood movies are competing with corporate videos or with YouTube movies shot with a camera phone or webcam. They all serve different purposes and, as a result, adopt different production values. Professional designers should not feel threatened by this proliferation of content created by enthusiastic amateurs - the more experience people have with creating content for themselves, the more they will appreciate the skills the professionals bring to bear.