The Art and Science of Rapid E-learning Design

I was discussing Adobe Captivate on a Moodle forum here. This got me thinking about workflow processes for rapid e-learning. This is sort of a touchy subject for those of us who create content because it is both a science and an art. We are designers (whether we realize it or not). We are artists (whether we like it or not). We are also psychologists of a sort as well as workflow analysts.

I think the best instructional designers realize the balance of science and art. We must stay abreast of the latest research in the field of instructional design and educational psychology. We must also keep current with the latest trends in Web 2.0 and software applications. This is the science part. We must also be aware of the art of design: layouts, typography, color balance, human-computer interfaces, etc. More than that we must be aware of the business use of our skillsets: our job is to help businesses become more effective/efficient and improve their bottom lines. We do this by providing excellent training materials which yield a performance improvement for employees (we hope).

If we've done our job well, we've helped employees improve their lives by improving their workflow processes. We've made the supervisors happy because productivity increases. It's a win-win-win situation. I love it! This is exciting and fun stuff to me.

So I'm going to outline my current workflow process for creating rapid e-learning content in a future post. I've learned much from Tom Kuhlman at Articulate on his blog (you should subscribe to it!).