Project leadership

Many of the principles enabling effective collaboration between members of a learning design team are the same as within the development pathway of other types of training.

Distance learning design however in particular can introduce different challenges.
Such projects:

are more expensive to develop than face-to-face training (especially for e-learning)
require co-ordinated production and delivery
require different sets of skills and so you may find yourself working with different types of people.

What are the things you will need to do to make sure your design project is successful?

Cover your bases

Make sure you have covered all aspects of the production process by people who know what they are doing.

Build the team

As with most organisational activities, things work best if the team works well together. It may therefore be useful to consider some teambuilding activities to pull everybody together before the development process starts. Consider including the subject-matter team in this as well.

Have a clear vision

Make sure everyone in the project, including training personnel, technical people and stakeholders within management, has a clear picture about the end product.

Be clear at the outset about individual success criteria.

Make sure you know what each of the people mentioned above see as a successful outcome to the project.

Manage the sign-off process carefully

The most predicatable delay that will happen in any learning design project is in turning around sign-offs of content. There are a number of reasons for this:

Subject signatories invariably under-estimate how long it will take to read draft materials carefully
Content always seems different when it has moved from a printed storyboard to the screen
Detail can change during the time it takes to script materials

Project managers must therefore be very clear about deadlines at this stage.

Follow sound project leadership principles

Keep the project moving in the same way as you would any other type of training development project.

As with all projects, there is always the possibility that Murphy's Law will apply. But if you have done the above planning thoroughly, the chances of something happening that causes serious problems will be minimised.

Murphy's Law says that if anything can go wrong, it will, and this certainly applies to multimedia design projects. It is therefore a good idea to carry out a risk analysis process at the start of the project.

Who is involved in design?