e-Learning to Wisdom!
OPTIMISTS project that the e-learning market will grow at the annual rate of 50% with the market segment reaching a value of $18 billion dollars by year 2005.
With potential expertise in this field, it is likely that India will become a favourite hotspot for the establishment of centres of e-learning design and production.
This career opportunity requires highly skilled manpower that have specialised expertise. At this point of time though the demand far outstrips the supply of trained people in the business, which will actually open up new avenues for the professional to explore, and build a satisfying career in the area of e-learning.
For e-learning to be a viable career path for a broad and diverse set of professionals, it must be more than a well-known term. There must be a solid knowledge base, expectations for future growth, and skill sets that are in demand.
So what does it take to be successful in this new, burgeoning field? What are the career options and what is the required background and skill set?
The current scenario
To get a rough idea of the current scenario, just log on to any good web site and type e-learning, or instructional designing and you will see many opportunities listed.
On one of the popular sites, there were desperate requirements for 87 professionals in the area for the Delhi/Mumbai region alone! Hyderabad itself shows requirements for instructional designers by the large multi-national agencies quartered there.
The demand abroad is phenomenal, and mimics the pre-Y2K stage when megacorps were hiring Indian expertise as if there was to be no tomorrow!
In India, even small- or medium-sized organisations that are involved either in creating e-learning courses or happen to consider a foray into this nascent field, need the following trained people. Instructional designers, content creators or course writers, reviewers, graphic designers and graphic visualisers. Besides these, the support matrix of project managers, marketing professionals and others make this a new area of business opportunity.
Each category of people mentioned above need a specific skill-set, background, and qualifications:
Instructional designers are the key to any successful e-learning venture. They design modules that facilitate learning. They act as a bridge between technology and learning theories. Being familiar with the Instructional Design Model (ISD) to create learning modules, they need to incorporate adult learning principles, and different learning styles. IDs are required to transform organisation-learning needs to personal learning needs and analyse them to derive learning plans.
Most universities do not offer courses in instruction design. The theory is however covered in distance learning courses on educational technology.
In the United States, however, several universities offer graduate and postgraduate level programmes in instructional design.
Skills and knowledge that make up the competency include the ability to elaborate each phase of ISD model; write correct learning objectives; create a course or module using at least two different learning theories; create assessments at various levels of the Bloom Taxonomy; analyse and segregate the requirements into learning categories; apply adult-learning principles in creating learning modules.
Good academic and research background in any area and ability to learn quickly is key to the role of an instructional designer.
Content creators and course writers
The creation of course material requires using the style sheets or guidelines given by the subject matter expert. Any graduate or postgraduate who has flair for writing, can read and assimilate written material, and can quickly create outlines of the content is a good candidate for this position.
Reviewers
Review work is divided into following categories: language reviewers; instructional design reviewers and, human interface design reviewers.
These would need a sound background in the English language and an easy familiarity with different writing and learning styles.
Design reviewers would need a good understanding of ID principles, while human interface reviewers would need navigational functionality and a high standard of graphic user interfaces.
Persons involved in quality review or quality auditors are ideal candidates for this role
Graphic designers constitute two broad categories. Designers and authoring tool experts. Graphic designers are the ones who have had formal training in multimedia, and can create beautiful images using graphic tools. They need to be artists with a creative bent of mind.
Authoring tool experts should have a good understanding of authoring tool including features like embedding technology where the need to embed, audio, video and graphic features would be addressed.
Visualisers must have a good knowledge of designing principles, and colour theory. A background in fine arts would ideally benefit a person in this role.
The field is wide open and opportunities exist for graduates in fine arts, in technology, in mass communication and in creative writing.
Analytical skills would indicate an opening for experienced teachers, while advertising professionals could look at lucrative careers in visualising and marketing. e-Learning has come to stay especially in the time-hungry mores of the day, where face-to-face training and development has become a luxury that organisations can seldom afford!
DR. VINOD JOSHI
Prof Joshi is the head of SQL Learning, Hyderabad
vinod_joshi@yahoo.com
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