Author: Juan Carlos Vidal, eLearning Resource Manager Templates allow organizations to produce courses in a small fraction of the time it would take to do traditionally. According to our experience on more than 1600 courses developed with SHIFT, using SHIFT's templates saves at least 50% on labor costs and up to 75% on development schedules, consistently. There are several misconceptions around using templates. Top on the list is that templates reduce creativity: quite the opposite I think: having access a very large library of templates gives the Instructional Designer the tremendous flexibility of being able to choose from a very diverse, best-of-breed set of preconfigured interactions. It also gives our designers access to previously complex or too-expensive to develop interactions. Templates actually increase flexibility, they're easy to update, and they provide consistency across the enterprise. They can also reduce costs, training time, and reduce variability due to programming bugs. Templates allow our organization to: Incorporate best practices and effectiveness to the learning process: each new template goes through several effectiveness and usability tests before they're released to the production process. Its designing process incorporates best practices in usability from the ground up. Reduce error by exhaustive technical tests: before a template is released to the production process, it goes through several tests in different platforms and conditions in order to eliminate programming bugs. Be dynamic, by constant improvement and updates: templates can be improved regularly to meet technological and instructional requirements as well as the client's needs. These are easily tracked and updated. Templates mean results for our organization: dramatically reduce costs, time to market and most significantly, give the Instructional Designer more power, more choices, and much more independence.

A few years back, a group of entrepreneurs were pondering at the question every e Learning organization has: what is the right balance between cost, development time and quality. No organization is immune from this dilemma. The entrepreneurs were trying to figure out a way to break the paradigm and find a way where organizations would be able to reduce cost, development time while maintaining or even augmenting quality and reliability. It was no surprise to anybody that labor had, by far, the largest impact in overall cost and on time-to-market. The analysis took many different paths, but in the end, the conclusion was that a method to reduce labor without affecting the end product was needed. A detailed value chain analysis for the e Learning development process was conducted and several conclusions were reached: a- The instructional design process is critical and where the learning strategy is formulated and to a significant degree, executed. b-The graphic design process is essential for the user experience; however, parallel to the creative aspect, there are underlying mechanical, repetitive, time consuming processes. c- The programming stage, needed for most things more complex than a page turner, was mostly mechanical, prone to wrong interpretations, programming bugs and human error. The group also interviewed end customers and created a value matrix, where different stages were given different "value score". The result was that the end user appreciated an engaging story, dynamic, interactive and effective experience, usable interface, but did not care much how many work hours it took to design the interface or how many days it took to program the functionality. The user just cared for a great learning experience. A bit unfair for the development team, but users pressed for a better product, faster and as always, with a limited budget. After going through several options, the group chose the winning solution was radical process automation through technology. By automating those time consuming, repetitive tasks, organizations would be able to dramatically save labor, be able to deliver much more quickly and reduce human error. Next step: creating the technology..

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.