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Choosing a Vendor Evaluate Their Products
 There is no substitute for evaluating the vendor's products. Assess the quality of the instructional design. The navigation should present little or no additional cognitive load on the user. Pace should be completely under the control of the user. The appearance should be professional and inspire confidence. Measure the amount of interactivity: retention rates are directly related to the amount of interaction. Is the content "chunked" such that individual topics can be accessed directly? Does the product operate consistently or does it vary significantly with available bandwidth? Are there delays in loading content which would disrupt learning processes, in particular by impacting short-term memory processes? Is the software defect-free?
Above all, remember that what matters is how much learning takes place, not whether the product uses all the "hottest" new technologies. Often pedagogic value is sacrificed for the sake of showcasing a technology or using a particular delivery mechanism. Products are stripped down until they will run appropriately on the available bandwidth, for example. They are nice products, but they're most often no longer effective training. Things that flash, zoom, twinkle and bounce, for no apparent reason other than that it was fun to program, often cause serious split-attention effects which actually impair the learning process. Make sure your computing infrastructure can truly support the vendor's products. Just because you have an intranet does not mean it can support learning with a given eLearning product. Learning isn't "browsing" and learning isn't "downloading into your brain". Think of yourself in a classroom. We all know how difficult it is to learn if the instructor delivers information too quickly. The opposite is also true: it is difficult to learn if information is delivered too slowly or too unpredictably. Humans have immense long-term memory capacity and very limited short-term memory. In order to be retained, information must first be assembled in short-term memory before complex cognitive processes effectively move it to long-term memory. Delays in delivery impair this process. Imagine the phone rings. You have won $100 if you can answer a skill-testing question. They read the question: "Johnny's mother sends him to the store to buy 3 apples, 4 grapefruit, 1 watermellon and 5 oranges. An apple costs 3 cents, a grapefruit ............................ long pause.............. ............................. ". You needed to hold the first bits of information in short-term memory while you waited for the remainder. The pause, just like a "Loading" delay, probably caused you to lose at least some of the information and you failed the skill-testing question. E-learning is exactly like that. Disturbances to short-term memory function will impede learning. Delays and unpredictability of throughput can cause good eLearning products to fail. Remember too that your computing infrastructure is probably not uniform over time or over distance. Make sure that the product is viable at any time of day and from all sites where you have trainees. If it isn't, can the vendor give you the same course in multiple delivery formats: desktop/client delivery for where your bandwidth is poor and intranet delivery for where bandwidth is good, for example? In general, eLearning products must not place more demand on computing resources and networking resouces than your organization is prepared to dedicate to eLearning. Next - Evaluate Their Tools and Software Architecture |