Maintenance is the elephant in the Learning and Development room

Developing a new online learning course is a joy! It’s a fresh start, you can be creative, you can put your ideas into practice and everyone is energised to see the final outcome. The feeling of creating something new is quite unique, but as soon as it’s done, the entire team of developers, subject experts and instructional designers rush to the next project and the old one is easily forgotten.

Maintaining an older course is a completely different story. It’s like a puzzle where many pieces are missing. The storyboard is not up-to-date, some source files cannot be found, others are in an older format, the voice-over artist is missing and the aspect ratio feels about right for the 90s…

This happens for most bespoke training courses and after 12 years in the eLearning filed, each time I see a maintenance project coming in, it feels like the groundhog day. The same story each and every time…

And this shouldn’t be a surprise. If we look at the mainstream eLearning methodologies, such as ADDIE or SAM, we see the focus is on the course development cycle and less so on the course life-cycle. Phases like maintenance and decommissioning are completely missing.

ADDIE Model provides no support for a full life-cycle

Maintenance of eLearning content should be a major priority for everyone in the Learning and Development field. After all, you wouldn’t buy a car if you can’t fix it once it is broken. And eLearning coursers can be just as expensive as a car, with the average hour of eLearning being estimated at around $22,000.

This is especially worrying if we consider the fact that the half-life of information now ranges from 2.5 years to 5 years. Based on my experience, any online learning course will require minor updates every 1 to 2 years, major updates every 3 to 5 years, and a complete redevelopment once every 10 years.

And maintaining a training course is not a walk in the park, as some might think. Even the most basic changes can incur a significant cost:

• If you want to update a sentence in the audio-narration and not having access to the initial voice artist will require a complete rework of the course audio narration and sometimes even a resynchronisation of the course animation, leading to costs as high as 30% of the initial development;
• Having to change the script in a video simulation or video presentation with actors will require a video production day, which starts at 5.000€; If the actors changed their appearance or are not available, think about a complete rework;
• Having to perform a minor change in a video animation and not having the After Effects source files means that you need to completely redevelop the video animation;

With maintenance in mind, we might even design the online content in a different manner. For example, content that may change should be kept out of video formats. Procedures that are regularly updated might be taken out of an online course and uploaded on a Knowledge Management System, where everyone can learn and contribute and improve such content.

Bottom line here is that maintenance is not something that can be done retroactively. It is something that should be planned ahead. Some elements that I encourage everyone to consider are:

• Use an Interoperability Standard. This makes your content compatible with future platforms that you organisation may want to adopt; SCORM 1.2 is a popular choice, but xApi and IMS LTI are offering some more up-to-date features;
• Make it Accessible and follow common standards and specifications, such as WCAG 2.1, as this is not something you can easily do at a later stage;
• Get All Source Files, for all file types. Storyline sources, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Camtasia and any other tool that was used to edit multimedia content.
• Get Voice-Artist and Actors Full Details, to make sure you can work with them at a later stage, if you want to update some elements.
• Offload Content to Other Formats if you can, as less content mens less maintenance; procedures, checklists and other such elements can be easily moved to a KMS;
• Avoid Video Format for Content that is Regularly Changed, as videos tend to require more effort to update;
• Avoid Fancy Animations as research shows that animation has a negative impact on learning unless it is intrinsic to the training content;
• Avoid Decorative Graphics as research shows these have a negative impact on retention rate as it activates prior knowledge that may not be useful for the target content;
• Use Mainstream Technologies. Make sure that the technologies you are using are mainstream enough to be maintained for at least 10 more years (remember that Adobe Flash was still heavily used in 2010 and just 10 years later is not even permitted to run on modern web browsers);
• Keep Course Documentation Up-to-Date, as a go-to place in order to understand the HOW and WHY of each course;

Looking forward to here you experiences on course maintenance in the comments below.