Nick Shackleton Jones on Rapid Development at the BBC - LSG Webinar Notes

These are live blogged notes from the Learning and Skills Group Webinar today.

Nick Shackleton Jones is the Informal Learning Manager at the BBC and the author of one of my favourite LnD blogs.

Why Rapid Development

• Increase Output
• Reduce Development Costs
• Develop your trainers
• Reduce Development Timelines
• Involve Client and SMEs in Development
• Maintain control and updatability

We do this now because we can!

The Big Picture: Now you can co-create content with your SMEs with a low budget and you don't need to wait ages to gather the money to do something. Bottoms up is the future of LnD.

Challenges - What's the worst that could happen?

The worst that could happen could be:

• Clients as authors
• and Trainers become developers

Not sure this is a bad thing though, because purposing content is a skill too. As Nick mentioned, training becomes the quality control in this situation.

The worst that could happen is that nothing really happens.

So where are BBC today and how did they get there?

BBC does some really cool courses using really rich media, videos, etc -- I saw one of them last year. Some of their clients are actually producing some high quality content as Nick demonstrated.

Application training has become really easy to create, using tools such as Camtasia. Within the space of days or hours, there's an LMS compatible course available for your new system.

They've now started to do some really immersive game-like environments and some very interesting courses, e.g. the ones they've done on Storytelling.

What they learnt along the way.

'Mistakes are often the stepping stones to failure.'

Process

• Pair client with the learning consultant
• Project management skills
• Instructional design skills
• Technical/graphical skills
• Retain control of publishing to LMS
• Online workflow helps
• Have a strong implementation
• Lead by example - show great stuff as examples!
• Have a rapid development 'bucket' budget

Content

• Create a template - so courses look like they've come from the same source
• Separate 'awareness' from 'resources'
• Use scenarios - put people in a situation and provide them feedback on what they do
• Contextualise/ tell stories
• Polish the graphics
• Consider Accessibility - rapid tools can do this in a repeatable, standard fashion
• Use video/ voice-over if possible
• Keep the length less than 20 mins
• Feature peers where you can - people like to see people they know