Much is being written these days about “outsourcing e-learning”, whether it be down the street or across the world. Travis Piper, President of Creative Approaches was asked by the American Management Association to share his experience and expertise in this area related to custom e-learning development.

"Outsourcing Versus Insourcing Your
e-Learning Projects"
is the title of the chapter written by Travis Piper for The AMA
Handbook of E-Learning, copyright 2003, AMACOM. The entire chapter is available online.

Subjects addressed include:

• the pros and cons of creating an internal organization vs. using external resources
• items to consider if the decision is made to hire a staff
• how to support and maintain the e-learning process
• retooling standup trainers to become e-proficient
• a checklist for potential vendors
• creating an effective RFP
• tips and hints for hiring and for outsourcing

For additional information, and to purchase the Handbook of E-Learning, visit the AMA Web Site.

Of course you would expect Creative Approaches (a custom CBT/WBT vendor) to recommend that you outsource your CBT/WBT development because that's where our business comes from. But consider these real-world experiences we've had in recent months then read the below excerpts from ONLINE LEARNING NEWS - it pays to think twice about hiring your own in-house developers.

Recent Experience #1: "Our In-House Resource is Gone"

We were contacted by an instructor-led training development and delivery firm. Two years ago they sent one of their people to a class on Authorware to learn to create a CBT course from one of their classroom courses about a software product they support. First they purchased Authorware. Then the scenario proceeded like this:

The new author created the course (his first and therefore his worst course)
The firm sold a few copies of the course to their clients
The new author decided authoring wasn't his "thing" and left the department
The software being trained by the Authorware course was significantly updated by its developer, rendering the present Authorware course useless
The firm contacted Creative Approaches to update the course
During update, the course's content was found to be extremely inconsistent. Graphical transitions were overused and annoying. Wrong answer responses were sporadic at best. Coding techniques were highly inefficient. Even though the update involved adding more screens and response feedback for all interactions, the revised course files were smaller than the original files, thus permitting reasonable performance over a 56kb connection. Plus the revised course will be easier to maintain in the future. Also, by working with us, the client has now learned of other services we provide that can help him not only with course delivery, but also helping him to market the course.

Recent Experience #2: "We've Changed our Minds"

A publishing vendor decided to get into the multimedia business. They sent one of their staff to Director classes then hired a summer intern to develop their first project for a major client. They brought in a member of our firm for some initial consulting assistance with getting the program started, recommending techniques, etc. At the end of the summer, the intern went back to school. The resident in-house Director trainee had not worked enough on the program during the summer to be able to effectively complete the project. The firm had to call in Creative Approaches to complete the project and meet their deadline. They have now decided that multimedia is not their "thing", and they plan to outsource all future work. Unfortunately, making that decision early on would have saved the firm time, money and other resources.

Recent Experience #3: "Good Programmers Weren't Enough"

We recently heard from a company which was working on the first of many Web based courses already being actively marketed within their client base. Optimistic about their investment, they placed development of their on-line courseware in the hands of two highly capable programmers with a variety of necessary equipment. Work continued for months however nothing could ever be shown to management that "flowed" or had any design consistency to it. The marketing department now found themselves with a course having "unfriendly" content that was dry, wavered from topic to topic with no clear focus, contained grammatical errors, and looked like a "hodge-podge". The developers had modeled the course from an outline of the stand-up training presentation. Though the course was fully functional and error free from a programming perspective, no attention had been paid to graphical interface design, effectively written content, intuitive navigational design or varying the question types to retain the user's interest. When management called upon Creative Approaches for assistance with the course, we were able to provide instructional writers, graphic artists and expert CBT developers. In recognizing where things went wrong, the firm's marketing director admitted, "we couldn't devote enough time to assist our programmers with the necessary support with regard to writing, course design, and effective graphical design… we ended up relying on Creative Approaches to 'clean up' our first course. It would've been more cost effective to have hired them --with all those resources under one roof -- in the first place. "

Excerpts from ONLINE LEARNING NEWS

The following is excerpted from an article titled "YELLOW LIGHT ON INSOURCING" which appeared in the January 25, 2000 issue (Vol. 2, No. 44) of ONLINE LEARNING NEWS published by Bill Communications Inc.

"If you're considering bringing development of Web-based training in house after initially having it done by outside designers - think carefully, warns Dave Rogers … a science-course coordinator with Open Learning Agency in Victoria, British Columbia, which develops Web-based courses for senior high schools.

… If development of your courses require programmers and programming, Rogers' warning goes double. "The market for programmers is extremely tight these days," he cautions, "and your in-house effort could become dependent on staff you cannot hire."

"… Any training which has the learner interacting with a server computer," says Rogers, "will require a programmer or programmer/analyst to keep it running. …The cost will be steep, since programming is expensive - but the cost of not being able to hire rare staff will be steeper."

Rogers' agency currently has instructional designers on staff, but hires outside programmers. When asked why the agency could not continue to staff in-house programmers, Rogers responds, "couldn't pay 'em enough to keep 'em!"

As with any highly specialized task, skills only stay sharp when they are used day in and day out. Don't expect to hire a team of CBT or WBT specialists, have them work on a big project only to be "kept busy with other tasks" until the next CBT/WBT project comes along. They will get "rusty" with their skills and (more likely) will leave for a full-time job with a full-time multimedia development firm.

In the late '70s, many large organizations established in-house video production studios to create promotional and training videotapes. Over time, it became too expensive to keep up with the state-of-the-art standards for equipment. Plus, talented videographers were being asked to "go set up a camera in a lecture hall and tape the keynote speaker's address". Today most organizations outsource their video production to specialty studios that can focus strictly on producing top-quality jobs for their clients - their incentive: the competition between outsource agencies encourages maximum quality at minimum cost. An in-house group has no competition. The same is true of CBT/WBT/multimedia/e-learning development.

Also, don't overlook the cost of the tools necessary for a development staff. The tools and the course content, especially video and audio, require a great deal of disk storage space, state-of-the-art computers, specialized software tools (that require updating nearly every year), scanners, CD burners, audio and video digitization equipment, and other miscellaneous tools and paraphernalia.

Consider too that these specialists are doing tasks that may be unique within your entire organization. Will they feel that they are a part of the company culture? Will there be job advancement opportunities for them outside of the CBT/WBT group? If traditional company values are still based on long-time employee retention, hiring those "multimedia types" may not be in the organization's best interest.