Trainers Talk Tech

I've noticed a trend on the social networking groups, and when I talk to people at the conferences I present at: trainers and instructional designers are freaking out again. I mean nervous, edgy, freak outs about eLearning. In 2000, training and development people were losing their minds because they believe that the sky was falling and eLearning was going to steal their jobs. They were convinced that they would be replaced by a screen and a mouse. Nothing was further from the truth, as eLearning has grown into a tool that is used as a part of an overall training strategy.

Most of the eLearning in 2000 was awful, text driven stuff created by tech people who didn't care about how people learn. They wanted to exploit this new technology and throw everything up against the wall and see what stuck. We have developed best practices we are using today because of all the crazy things developers tried early on, myself included.

But, that has changed. Good eLearning is hard to create, not always from a programming perspective, but from the design perspective. Tools have been created to rapidly develop, but the amazing, interactive custom stuff still takes lots of time to plan, design and build. Which brings me back to my first question : why are people freaking out?

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