Maintaing Courses For Globalized Businesses
The two most important questions that a learner needs to ask is the "who" and "what" question. In the globalized world, the who question seldom returns a set of learner who are homogenous. The set of potential learner for a course could be from different geography, having different cultural backgrounds and language preferences. Indeed some maybe operating in somewhat different business environments.
The easy and potentially expensive solution would be to reduce this diversity into smaller homogenous groups and then create a course for each and every of these groups. Course maintenance to take care of updates could become tricky, as changes in the common parts of the course needs to be updated across the variants. Embracing the reuse mantra in SCORM through creation of reusable modules (called SCO in SCORM-talk) and then packaging them through tools like the Adobe SCORM Packager (part of the Adobe eLearning Suite), or Adobe Captivate Aggregator functionalily. This will allow you to reduce maintenance efforts and ensure that changes made to common modules have been deployed across all variants uniformly.
Localization of content is a significant challenge in our rapidly globalized workplace. IT training on new software from Adobe, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle etc. are localized in tens (indeed hundreds in some cases) of languages as business is no longer restricted in Americas or EMEA. Soft-skills training need to be localized as also globalized to take into account cultural sensitivities. The traditional SLA between client and content creator required that all content be externalized, so that they can be changed by the client without the engagement of the vendor. Content as in audio, video, graphics, text.
While this does work in theory, often it creates a situation where we are trying to fit a round nail through a square hole! Trying to ensure that the German text fits into the space vacated by the English space can require more iterations than we think. In software development, we can create a dialog box which may have some strings ending with "…". Or get strings truncated. Can we afford the same in eLearning? Now try doing the same with audio and video! Customers having paid for the externalisation framework, often enough find themselves back to the vendors to make changes that they thought they would be making internally.
An alternate methodology maximizes the usage of rapid tools like Adobe Captivate in content creation and content integration. This would allow you to maintain the content and effect small changes to the content internally (and in cases in local offices) using resources who are icon-draggers with no scripting skills. And all this without any reduction in learnability of the content.
While major changes will still require a call to the vendor, we save significantly overall if we use rapid tools and reuse.
Subscribe to RSS feeds
