Why is Collaboration Important When Building eLearning Content?

Development of eLearning is clearly a collaborative process between instructional designers, subject matter experts, graphic developers, and others.  Let’s take a look at how we can manage the efforts of this diverse group of people.

For the vast majority of organizations, this collaborative process is often inefficient. The process usually involves many emails, chat sessions and conference calls, and eventually results in one person, often the instructional designer, left to manage the production task.

Unfortunately, many tools on the market focus solely on the production task or the creation of the final product and are not built around the true development process. Installing authoring software on desktops is certainly not a scaleable solution. The act of turning the content into a course is a small percentage of the overall cost of development. The real cost involves the upfront work of uniting the input from the different parties into something that can be produced.

To manage these efforts efficiently, one needs a true collaborative, or shared environment that everyone involved in the development process can partake. This collaborative environment can take different forms but is certainly more formal than the desktop-based, email, and chat anarchy that have been around for a long time.  An ideal environment would allow each of the parties involved to directly contribute to the development process. For example, a subject matter expert could directly add their know-how into the course structure as defined by the instructional designer. As opposed to forcing a subject matter expert into becoming an author, he or she should be able to contribute to the process by adding content directly into the shared course development environment using basic computer skills.

Management is only possible when there is control over the process. Given the multitude of people involved in the courseware creation process, a collaborative environment is required to establish such control before true management can take place.  The ability to assign permissions in the online environment provides this management capability. 

Take a look at how CourseAvenue’s clients work together in a collaborative authoring environment at http://www.courseavenue.com/studio.aspx.