Jon Lloyd currently works for VMG. But back in the day, Jon worked for a company called eHelp. Maybe you've heard of eHelp? Maybe not? eHelp is the company that bought RoboDemo, now Adobe Captivate, to market. A few years back, another now-defunct company–Macromedia–absorbed eHelp. But that's another story.
Getting back to Lloyd, he knows a thing or two about eLearning. Lloyd says that many young developers have got it wrong when it comes to how long it really takes to develop eLearning.
According to Lloyd, "Rapid eLearning has seen a seven or eight year maturation that sometimes amuses me quite a bit. Why? Because many of the young developers have probably never had the experience of working within a large multimedia development team consisting of designers, storyboard teams, Flash developers, and creative artists. They are reduced to storyboarding in PowerPoint or Post-its, developing in Captivate or Articulate, and using iStockPhoto to fill in for their illustrative work."
"I believe that rapid is only relative if you compare development to the 'old days'–which consisted of large teams with fairly specialized talent (not excluding the folks using Director or Authorware!)," Lloyd continued. "Interestingly, when eHelp released their first version of RoboDemo, and even though it was a brand new tool in a new market, there was a high degree of difficulty selling people on the value of going to our training classes. 'Hey, this is easy! I can crank out training in no time!' Not so fast Sparky!"
Click here to read Jon's entire article. Trust me, it's worth the click!