IT 5650: The People-Process-Product Continuum in E-Learning
September 11, 2008When I first read “The People-Process-Product Continuum in E-Learning: The E-Learning P3 Model” by Badrul Kahn, I thought, wow, must be nice to have the luxury of all of those people. The more I thought about it, I decided that I was gald I didn’t work for an organization that had that large of a staff because then I wouldn’t get to do all of the things that I do. For example, in my current role, I’m responsible for everything from initial planning and project management to course development and implementation. I do work with a multimedia designer for my media requirements though.
I’m guessing that many factors impact how a learning organization/department is structured. For example, I bet things like the volume of courses, course type, release/update schedule, and resource pool influence the role that an ID plays and what other positions are needed. I also think that finding a team of people who are able to be productive and efficient would need to be considered. For example, if you had a team of seven IDs and two multimedia designers who did everything, and you were trying to find ways to be more effective and efficient, you might start to wonder if it would make more sense to have fewer IDs who focused on the ID work and then had one or two people do the production side of things.
I’m curious what other people thought of this article.
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I’ve had the luxury of working with that many people. I’ve been on a multi-billion dollar eLearning enterprise solution for a large internatioanal insurance company and the eLearning components were broken down into smaller teams. 🙂
I really liked this article as well. It seems that there are several people in this class like us that have read this article, seen the multiple roles that are listed and had the reaction, “Gee, I did all that by myself?!” I think that you are right that it is a delicate balance between constructing teams of people that are large enough that they have all the skills necessary yet not so large that productivity starts to drop off.
I had similar thoughts about the organization I work for. Mine is very small, so my work is quite varied. I like it this way because I don’t get bored. On the other hand, sometimes it is nice to be able to focus on one or two things that you are really good at. Sounds like neither of us have that luxury (if you want to think of it that way). I have worked for larger companies, and fing that the collective “smartness” you get when you put lots of people and minds on a task is lost in the smaller organizations.
I agree that some organizations don’t have the capacity to employ every role described by Badrul and sometimes we are left to perform many roles. I think this is typical in corporate environments. Part of the solution may be what you suggest about making sure that employees work with a skill set that balances the overall project for an optimum productivity.
I had the same initial thoughts when reading this article – where in the world are there organizations that have so much invested in training and development? I am guessing that most organizations that do are in the business of training and developing – as opposed to being in another industry and investing a lot of resources in employee training.
I work for a mid-size insurance carrier that has multiple training departments. I’m amazed everyday of our lack lusters and shortcomings of the products that we produce. Collaboratively we have a large vast group. Unfortunately the way we are set up each training group lives in its own silo. Within the silos there are up to 7 id’s. In my silo we have 3 id’s and me id/multimedia. What I have found in our silo and many of the other ones is a shortfall. The jack of all trades syndrome where all id’s do everything. I would love to see our organization use the resources in a more productive manner as mentioned in the article. Stray away from the the jack of all trades and create masters in there own element. I feel that this change would eliminate future bland deliverables.
I liked the article also, particularly the process identified as to what goes into development of a large venture. On the other hand, I do not know of anyone that has a staff this large. Having been in the corporate environment for some time, training is an expense, not one that brings in revenue-no organization would put this amount of resources into an internal staff for internal purposes and if they were in the position to have to cut to generate more to the bottom line these are the staff that get cut first. I think a staff of this kind exists in a dream world.