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Why elearning projects fail or struggle

Page history last edited by Michael M Grant 14 years, 2 months ago

Professionals are very busy.  If training is not required at the top levels or is not absolutely necessary for job performance / expectations, participation is often low.


 

  1. Failure to accurately scope the project (can grow out of control)
  2. New Instructional Designers intimidated to keep control – don’t know how to handle SMEs
  3. Failure to take other responsibilities into account.  Get too ambitious that you can finish the project in small amount of time
  4. New designers tend to be too ambitious about the content design. They try to put everything they’ve ever learned about ID into the first thing they ever develop.

 

One word: Planning.

A company our size often times has several initiatives going on at one time in other departments. They put their own "elearning" together and if it

doesn't work or it misses a deadline, they come to us. By then, it's the first we heard of the project and now turns into a rush to get 'something' out without regard to learning performance.


 

-not designed for right audience

-too much content (information dump rather than training)


 

  1. Lack of funding
  2. Lack of support from higher management
  3. Poor communication between enterprise and vendor or SME and course designer
  4. Poor prototype. A poor prototype will affect the rest of the development
  5. Lack of skills to work with SME
  6. Out of scope requirement later on
  7. Unexpected issues (tech issues, etc)

 

First, and this is going away, the technology just isn’t ready.  The first elearning project I worked on was in 1988 and was based on the assumption that classroom teachers would have access to computers.  Back then many schools didn’t have computers.  It failed badly.  Today we have more access and better tools.

 

Second, the notion many administrators have that elearning is a gold mine.  We don’t have them in a classroom so why not register several hundred students for a course.  Forgetting the importance in interaction and engaging students. In case after case I have seen this lead to failure.

 

Third, fear.  Faculty that have not used elearning fear that they will lose their jobs, that someone will be looking at what they do, that the students will not pay attention to their online work, that it will not count toward tenure, that students will think it should be easier than F2F classes.  It is hard to sell any change in instruction to people who are afraid.

 

Fourth, caution.  ID professionals don’t want to promise too much so they undersell the power of elearning.  We stay away from virtual worlds rather than using them to find out how much can be learned there.  We don’t use games for fear of being thought non-academic.  If we don’t push the envelope we are hurting ourselves as designers.

 

Last, doing stuff that is cool but not based on theory and research.  Learning should always be at the base of any elearning project.  Projects that don’t focus on the key elements of instruction and learning always fail.  


 

A couple of reasons, but #1 is lack of doumentation of design requirements and standards (interactivity levels, graphics, etc) with prototype for designers/developers and reviewers to follow to prevent scope creep.

Storyboarding and prototyping help prevent scope creep and manage expectations.

 

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