Same Hours, Different Work
Recently, I explored why the total hours to build e-learning haven’t changed much over time. This week I want to look at something slightly different: where those hours actually go.
I went to a single-sex secondary school. In my second year there, the school established what was euphemistically called a Home Economics department – also known as cooking for boys.
Over the next two years I had mandatory, weekly cookery lessons. As learning experiences go this fell firmly in the hands-on, practical category. No knowledge-based nutrient or dietary classes. Just good-old fashioned, roasting, baking, frying and (the worst bit ever) washing-up afterwards.
And it was a pretty ambitious programme. We learnt to make every type of pastry known to man. We cooked, iced and decorated a Christmas cake. At the other end of the spectrum, we even learnt the art of peeling and boiling the humble spud.
The bottom line? Cooking has never held any mystery me. It’s just something that I know how to do and (most of the time) it’s something I’m happy to do.
So, coming from that perspective, I’ve always been a bit puzzled by people who say things like:
I haven’t got time to cook
Oh, it’s so difficult and complicated
It takes too long
I can’t be bothered with it
My perspective and experience has shown me, multiple times over that, if you know what you are doing and you are reasonably organised, preparing good food really doesn’t take much time; and the benefits of doing that massively outweigh the very small amount of time you might save when most of the food you buy is processed and prepared.
Of course, I get that “if you know what you are doing” is a massive caveat. Because if you don’t, cooking has the potential to feel like any other unknown skill. A little scary and intimidating.
But my reason for mentioning all this is not to advocate for practical cookery lessons in schools (although that wouldn’t be a bad thing). Instead, it’s because it’s a very recognisable way to introduce the topic that I wanted to explore this week: allocation of time.
We all need to eat. We all, to a greater or lesser extent, need to spend some time preparing what we are going to eat. Yet it’s perfectly possible for two people to spend similar amounts of time preparing food but to use that time very differently to produce the required output.
In other words, it’s not necessarily about the overall amount of time spent on something. It’s how you use that time and what you choose to do with it, within its boundaries.
The question of time
And this has been top-of-mind for me recently because of what I wrote a couple of weeks ago. If you are a regular reader, you might remember that I posted about how the amount of time spent on creating an hour of e-learning hasn’t changed that much over a good many years, despite significant developments in technology. Which seems highly counter-intuitive.
My conclusion was that, mostly, those technological developments have enabled us to create e-learning that is much more sophisticated both technically and visually, without actually speeding up the overall time to completion.
You can read the piece in full here
While I still think that conclusion is valid, it felt like there was another layer to this, which I hadn’t considered in the previous piece. And, as you will no doubt have gathered by now, I think the additional layer may be about allocation of time.
So, what do I mean by this?
Two different worlds
Well, I think that, “time to create an hour of e-learning” is almost certainly not a one-size-fits all affair. Broadly, I think there may be two quite different worlds in which e-learning design and development operates. Meaning that even though the same amount of time is needed to create an hour of e-learning, how that time gets used and allocated could look significantly different.
Actually, I suspect there are far more than two worlds. But the two I’m about to describe probably sit at two ends of quite a complex spectrum. They also make sense to me based on my experience of working with multiple clients of various sizes in a wide range of sectors.
The first world is what I’m going to call governance-heavy. This is a world that is typically inhabited by larger organisations and big corporates. In this world, creating a piece of e-learning is likely to involve a significant number of people, outside the core L&D team.
There are likely to be multiple stakeholders who will all need to be consulted and whose input will need to be considered. This is likely to result in much more documentation being produced. Many more meetings. More time on reviews. More time spent making sure everyone is aligned and that the final product satisfies multiple requirements, across the stakeholder spectrum.
In this world, it’s likely that in the production phase, there will be significant use of templates and pre-formatted designs. Time spent on governance and project management is partly clawed back by streamlining some aspects of production.
At the other end of the spectrum, the second world is what I’m going to call build-heavy. This is typically inhabited by smaller organisations, where there are fewer stakeholders and fewer layers of governance and management.
Much less time is spent of managing the project and getting everyone aligned and in agreement. Much more time is spent in the production phase, where existing templates and pre-formatted designs are less likely to dominate. Time saved by simpler governance and alignment allows for a more bespoke build.
And, it’s important to note that one world is not better or superior to the other. Each world exists because of the size or nature of the organisations operating in it.
In bigger organisations, the time spent on governance and alignment is an absolute necessity. Without that focus, total dysfunction is the likely alternative.
In smaller organisations, no-one is going to invent unnecessary compliance, governance and alignment across management and stakeholder layers that just don’t exist!
Of course, one significant and very important difference between those two worlds is in elapsed time for project completion.
In a governance-heavy world, it’s almost certain that there will be significant time gaps between (and within) phases. As many of you reading this will already know, co-ordinating the diaries of a large group of people in a big organisation is never easy.
But the total number of actual hours spent on a project will not be that different between the two worlds. It is just a question of where in the process more or less of that time is allocated.
No escaping hands-on production
However, regardless of the overall time allocation, there is no escaping the fact that both environments still require notable hands-on production time, whether the build environment is templated and pre-formatted or not.
Despite all the technological changes and despite the arrival of AI, some parts of the design and development process remain stubbornly human!
Technology has not (yet) managed to do much to reduce the friction and time required around building stakeholder alignment. Nor has it done that much to reduce the amount of time spent once you get hands-on with manual assembly, inside a given authoring tool.
Which begs an interesting final question, which I would like to come back to in a couple of weeks:
If both these important aspects of e-learning design and development remain stubbornly human, what exactly are we expecting technology to accelerate or optimise?
Until next time,
Andrew