We spend a lot of time supporting our customers when they're working on their initial projects for SH!FT, so we can see a lot of transformations taking place, especially in terms of how they think about publishing learning content across the organization, and how to take advantages of some real time-saving techniques.

While a lot of change management purists and life coaches might espouse the approach "change one thing at a time", I'm inclined to suggest that if you are going to make change to the tools you use to build e-learning content, you should also include a change to the processes you use to make the build happen.

If you're already working in a rapid e-learning framework what we're suggesting here isn't necessarily new because you're already thinking about some more rapid approaches to development, but a lot of folks - not all of them, but a sizeable contingent - are still using the tried & true standby of "ADDIE" when it comes to developing e-learning content.  While I won't engage in a detailed criticism of ADDIE here (a Google search of "Criticisms of ADDIE" will yield substantial results), the simple fact of the matter is that the waterfall/cascade nature of ADDIE is too linear and non-scalable for the kinds of volume demands we frequently face in e-learning content development.

Although we're certainly strong advocates for SH!FT and the concept of rapid e-learning development, you won't realize the advantage of the platform unless you're making an equally strong commitment to adapting your processes as well.

We compare the linear approach of ADDIE with the concurrent activity model known as Rapid Prototyping.