Case Study #17: e-Learning Development at the USDA

(First in a four part series…keep following the next few days!)

How is eLearning really affecting people’s everyday lives? Often we trumpet the theories, controversies, or pros and cons in the eLearning world, but stepping back into reality, it is important to keep perspective of how eLearning is truly affects the daily life of the people and companies who use it. The following blog posts are a case study of eLearning’s influence with the US Department of Agriculture.

Case Study #17: e-Learning Development at the USDA 

What Would You Do?

What would you do if you had to build 125 new e-Learning courses with more than 12,000 pages of completely custom content and more than 4,700 unique graphics and media items?

And what if every course – on top of being completely custom – still had to have exactly the same look and feel? And be SCORM conformant? And Section 508 compliant?

And what would you do if it took 35 days after you built just one course for your testing group to review, fix and approve it and, while you were building all these new courses, you also had to redesign that 35-day process to reduce it to only 3 days? And what if you had only 180 days to get all 45 of these courses built, tested, approved and loaded on your learning management system?

How would you do it? Is it even possible?

It is possible and the US Department of Agriculture’s “ Team AgLearn” did it. Read on to find out how they did it, how they earned a 533% ROI while doing it, and some of the other amazing benefits they achieved.

The Problem

Team AgLearn serves more than 130,000 USDA professionals in more than 20 business units spread all over the US. Like every organization in an era of shrinking budgets, Team AgLearn must find ways to do more with less. What makes this even harder when it comes to e-Learning is that the demand for e-Learning is going up. To meet these challenges, Team AgLearn’s director, Jerome Davin, and his leadership team knew they had to make fundamental changes to save time, save money, and still build and deliver more content.

The need for more e-Learning and the need to cut costs weren’t the only hurdles Team AgLearn faced. According to Davin, “Like all federal agencies, the USDA has strict standards for everything from bandwidth usage to LMS integration to Section 508 compliance.”

Although these standards create quality e-Learning, meeting them requires dozens of people to be part of both the development process and the review and approval process.

One way to build more courses would be to add more developers. Having more people might make it easier to build more courses, but it makes it much harder to meet the USDA’s strict standards. As Davin explained, “In many cases, Team AgLearn gets courses to put on the LMS that fall short of one or more of these standards – Section 508 being a leading failure.” If a course failed, Team AgLearn was forced to put it through a long and costly “test-fix- retest” process. That process ate up key resources – people, time and money – the USDA needed elsewhere. In most cases, the development process meant that a Team AgLearn professional spent almost all of their time dealing with only one course – from explaining the requirements of Section 508 to fixing SCORM issues to dealing with look-and-feel problems – all of which created a 1:1 model in which one Team AgLearn professional could focus on only one e-Learning course at a time. This process also meant the courses weren’t ready when the students needed them, which wasted even more time and money.

Follow up in the next couple days to read about the solution in this case study!