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Bursting the myths of instructional designing in e-learning.

Every day we come across many myths related to various fields including health, lifestyle, weather and many others. The most common myth is you can lose the weight by starving yourself. Well, no one can convince you in a better way than me that it is totally a false thinking. I took this way to reduce the weight and gained more 10 kg which I am not able to lose till date. So, one must not starve themselves but eat sensibly and do ample of exercise to lose weight. Similarly, there are many myths surrounding e-learning industry and especially instructional designing. So, let us have a look at them and also know why these are the myths and not facts.

  1. Anyone who creates a course can be an instructional designer

If you think so, then it will be a biggest mistake. Instructional designers are trained to understand the needs of a learner and also identify the learning gaps. They can work on a variety of topics, but their goal is not to focus on the topic but to bridge the learning gaps. So, only a formally trained person can be a good instructional designer as he/she can design the course based on various instructional designing theories and make the course more useful for the learner.

  1. Instructional designing means creating PowerPoint presentations

Most of the people have misconception that making a storyboard means gathering the content and putting it into a PowerPoint Presentation. However, this is not true. Instructional designing is much more than this. Instructional designers have to understand the content and then they analyze it. This is important in order to differentiate relevant and irrelevant content and also to find out the gaps.  Then they have to describe what the learners will gain after the completion of the course. Hence, they fix the learning objectives. Their next step is to arrange the content by maintaining the balance between audio and the OST. Apart from this, they have to provide the production team with relevant images, they have to decide on the flow of the course design as well as different strategies of designing, animations and several other things related to the course they are about to develop.

  1. Instructional designers cannot beat classroom trainers

It is a famous myth that when it comes to engaging and operative coaching, an instructional designer cannot compete with classroom trainers. However, by taking certain useful steps this myth can be proven wrong. One needs to make use of certain interactive elements such as clickable objects. You can also make use of scenarios which help in improvising critical thinking ability and problem solving skills of the learners. Animated graphics is also a great way of keeping the learner engaged throughout the course.

  1. Authoring tools can replace instructional designers

The invention of various authoring tools has made many people from the industry think that now there is no need of instructional designers as courses can be designed with the help of these tools. However, the fact is that authoring tools totally depend on the creative thinking of an instructional designer. These tools contain many built-in features and work as a medium to insert objects, shapes, colors to the course. But, it is an instructional designer who needs to plan which objects are to be used and how, which effects should be given to the design in order to make it more engaging and learner friendly. So, it is not any feature of the authoring tool but the skills of an instructional designer that play a vital role in bringing the course design alive.

So, these are a few myths busted here proving that Instructional Designing is a vital element of e-learning industry.

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Project Planning – Key to Projects’ Success

Success or failure of a project largely depends on its planning. A good detailed project plan can successfully drive a complex project to completion and a bad unclear project plan can even cause the simplest of projects to fail.

All project plans are governed by milestones. Every milestone carries a deliverable and a date. All the activities, processes, resources, and timeline revolve around these milestones. Projects run on milestones.

Every Project is exclusive because it has a particular set of operations designed to accomplish a goal. A Project is considered as a temporary entity as any project that starts has to end.

A project is said to be successful if
– all milestones are met as planned and
– the final product is delivered as per the scope and the clients’ expectations.

This calls for meticulous planning and execution.

All development activities are categorized into the following four phases of a project lifecycle:

  • Initiation Phase
  • Planning Phase
  • Execution Phase
  • Monitoring, Controlling & Closing Phase

Here we are discussing the planning phase in this blog. The planning phase covers a major part of the whole development process. It starts with the output of the initiation phase and ends by providing input to initiate the next phase i.e. the execution phase.

The most important step in the planning phase is creating a WBS i.e. Work Breakdown Structure. Detailed working at the WBS stage will help to successfully execute a project.  Based on the WBS one can be in a better position to define activities, plan schedules, align resources and commit a timeline.

In any project the most critical job is estimating the work effort and planning the resources to execute the tasks.

The first step will be to calculate activity duration. Once we estimate the number of work periods (weeks/months) required to complete the individual task with estimated resources we can work on how much time an individual task will take to get completed. Accordingly, based on the activity duration and scope, the resources can be categorized i.e. Fixed / floating resource and allocation on task/project.

Second step will be planning and aligning the resources on different task/project based on their skills vis-à-vis the project type. If the project is having scenarios then a resource with illustration skill has to be allocated, and if the project is of branching logic in HTML5 than a programmer with JavaScript skills has to be assigned on the programming task.

While planning the resources, the spotlight should also be on the longest path of the plan (Critical Path), which is going to use more time and money.

The next step will be to create a schedule where one has to analyze activity sequences, resource requirements, duration and schedule constraints. Three main factors need to be taken into consideration:
– Duration
– Task dependencies
– Constraints

On completion of this stage we will get to know the start date and finish date for each task.

The last stage of the planning phase is Control Schedule. At this stage the status of the project activities and processes are regularly monitored. If required, the schedule is updated accordingly and communicated to the team and client.

Finally, the Planning Phase ends here and Execution Phase begins. In the next blog we will discuss the Execution Phase.