New thoughts on getting started in e-learning

As you can see, I'm really having to rough it at the ITU Regional Human Capacity Development Forum for Africa here in Kampala. However, this abundance is not representative of the situations many of the delegates here are facing when trying to implement e-learning. And given that practically everyone here at the conference wants to attend the e-learning strategy workshop I am running here tomorrow with Kineo's Mark Harrison, there are many institutions looking to do just that.

It follows that we've been having a lot of discussions about where to start and how to get quick results. The conclusion, ironically, seems to be that you wouldn't start with e-learning - at least not classic e-learning in the CBT tradition, i.e. interactive tutorials that you page through. It's not that interactive, self-paced materials wouldn't be helpful, it's just that they're really hard to do well. It will take time for this expertise to be developed and the money is unlikely to be available to employ professionals. In the meantime, we need some quick wins.

The quick wins, in my mind, come through other, much simpler, forms of digital content:

• podcasts
• videos
• screen capture movies
• narrated presentations
• textual material (blogs, wikis, articles, papers)

True you still need some communication skills to use these media well, but the technical requirements are modest and the formats are familiar. That means plenty of people can help to prepare the content, not just l&d specialists. What's more, these media can be deployed relatively easily on mobile devices, which are in abundance here.

If the requirement is for formal learning interventions, i.e. courses, then it's clear that the digital content described above will not stand alone. That need not be a problem, however, as long as the content is integrated into a blend that includes other, more interactive, ingredients, such as discussions, collaborative assignments, quizzes and so on. It's a mistake, in my mind, to believe that all the elements in a successful online solution need to be wired together in a single package - combinations are simpler to put together and allow you to use the best tool for each job.

Above all, digital content is versatile: not only can it form part of a formal curriculum, it can also be accessed on demand and used by trainers in the classroom. It's a much more realistic starting point than a major effort to develop a library of stand-alone, interactive lessons.