Only 100% out

On Wednesday, at the eLearning Guild's DevLearn conference in San Jose, I spoke about the progress that's been made with the 30-minute masters project. So much progress, in fact, that it's become the 60-minute masters. Rapid developers Kineo took the 30-minute masters scripts and built a rapid e-learning course out of it - the trouble is no-one without the aid of stimulants could get through it in under an hour. We agreed that, from now on, 60-minutes it had to be.

A participant at my session - sorry I didn't catch the name - suggested that we reflect on how it could be that, as e-learning designers, we could get the timing so wrong. He also saved a lot of time by coming up with the answer. As he observed, the 30-minute masters content outline and script was created by subject matter experts, who also happened to be e-learning designers. We fell into the trap that, in the course itself, we warn SMEs to avoid, i.e. the temptation to tell the learner as much as you possibly can of what you know; what is sometimes called 'the curse of knowledge'.

Anyway, 60 minutes is still a modest amount of time for an SME to spend to learn the essentials of design for rapid e-learning materials. And they can do this for free at the Moodle site that Kineo set up to host the course. This is not the finished article, but it's very usable work-in-progress. Feel free to take a look yourself at the 60-minute masters and leave any comments in the forum.