According to TIS, the UK e-learning market has matured to become a mainstream activity and for many larger organisations this has meant a sudden growth of in-sourced e-learning development teams. These departments have been agile in meeting their organisational needs however the workload for many in-house teams has increased exponentially as they are being asked to deliver more learning content with fewer resources.
Imperial College London is a science-based institution with a reputation for excellence in teaching and research that attracts 14,000 students and 6,000 staff. Ashish Hemani, eLearning Project Manager at the Faculty Education Office, Imperial College London explains, “E-learning delivers huge benefits to our medical undergraduates, ensuring they receive consistent learning while on rotation at hospitals around the UK. However, the success of our e-learning programme meant our in-house project team became overwhelmed with further development requests. Partnering with TIS means we can draw upon additional development skilled resources without the costs of recruiting in-house or completely outsourcing development. We are able to share ideas with TIS’s experts, benefit from their experience in novel areas such as 3-D animation and serious games and dramatically reduce the turnaround time for e-learning development while still delivering high-quality learning interventions.”
Will Chadwick, Vice President of Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) explains, “Over the past two years, partnering with in-house training and development teams has become an integral part of TIS’s proposition. We work closely with several customers on this basis, providing them with much needed resources to strategically help meet deadlines, or to help deliver training projects that perhaps their in-house team have little past experience with – such as games, story based or mobile learning. Our highly skilled developers can sit in-house or work remotely in order to develop full e-learning programmes or innovative learning objects like serious games and 3-D animations to supplement basic e-learning. Flexibility is key – our TIS developers are highly proficient in using preferred authoring packages, so the in-house team can manage and update the e-learning when our consultant finishes working on the project. What’s more this blended method of delivering learning will ensure that learning content remains fresh, innovative and delivers meaningful results to the business or organisation.”
To help HR and L&D departments continue to innovative and deliver high quality learning content Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) suggests a three step review:
1. In-house HR departments and L&D teams first should to review and update their instructional design processes on a regular basis. Identify where the gaps are and query if the content can be delivered in a more innovative way to improve information retention. Limiting e-learning content delivery to “that’s how we’ve always done things” can have a negative outcome.
2. Assess whether existing authoring tools can be enhanced with the addition of learning objects such as 3D animations, Serious Games, business simulations or Flash-based content to ‘nail’ vital learning objectives located within courses.
3. Organisations should consider bringing either onsite or offshore professional resources onto specific projects if their e-learning needs exceed the development team’s ability to deliver innovative training in a high-quality and timely way. External support should not be seen as a threat but a way of enhancing or turbo boosting existing training capabilities.
