The end client – MACHS (Saudi Arabia) engagement was over a three year period, with one short trip to the college. Two introductory programs for professors and students of a college were created. They were audio-driven and asynchronous. More importantly though, they were:
- Our opportunity to participate in (get a foot in) a progressive movement (we’re supporting basic human rights – education, enterprise, independence – for Saudi women under the direct purview of a very strong leader in this movement) [and therefore we tried to be prepared to encounter even ridiculous situations]
- A fledgling private college’s introduction to supplementary and supporting learning systems as envisioned by the college head, and achieved with the help of external experts – to modernise their techniques, improve performance, and achieve and maintain national and global standards and relevance
- An opportunity to work with qualifiable teams, namely Teknomics (our direct client).
This engagement in itself was a first for the end client and we therefore decided to take extra care to involve them and provide logic/explanations at each stage and where requested.
SME (subject expert) support was recognized as a key component for project success and was requested by us at the onset of this engagement in the proposal document and subsequently reiterated verbally and through email.
This engagement was not a success. Our engagement did not get extended beyond the original three year period.
We understood that this engagement would be unique. When we provided our suggested solution to the end client we were looking for dedicated and remote involvement over a 3 year period. Enough time to ensure that whatever project we take up with them, we would be there to see it through to successful implementation. Such a time frame allows us to correct or adjust our practices and processes to align with our client’s and end client’s unique expectations and considerations. For example, the time frame estimated to complete and launch similar elearning courses is 3-6 months. The teachers and students elearning programs developed for the end client, combined, took around 24 months.
What caused this particularly long development cycle?
End client turnaround time. Poor involvement of “representatives of qualifiable teams”.
We view this as our failure. As their consultants, we were not able to empower or motivate our or our end client’s project coordinators/subject experts to work together and communicate more effectively. As once responsibility was passed on to others we were not able to elicit timely or helpful responses or reviews.
Our design and our client’s development teams waited, sometimes for months altogether, to receive approval, constructive feedback, or for that matter any feedback, from the end client coordinators and reviewers.
The language barrier with the end client was also an established consideration. Which is why a quick turnaround time helps, as it enables subsequent adaptation of the course at the right stage of development; for example, a translate button can be added to the player which the learner can use to read content in Arabic while viewing and listening to the course in English.
Our selection of the approach for these two elearning courses was based on the following considerations:
- Easy to understand, quick to develop and deploy, easy to update – A first project or launch is like a test phase. Apart from the objectives it intends to meet, it is there to help gauge the accuracy of our combined assumptions and modify future efforts and designs. It also helps to streamline our processes in terms of feedback and reviews and modify our understanding and assumptions on which our solutions and counsel will be based on. Indeed, a key factor of a successful first time engagement is simplicity on an error-free, easy-to-use platform. This helps create a strong foundation for us to continue working together as it enables boosted creativity for subsequent engagements as well as increased understanding of how to better address the challenges faced by faculty and students – the learners.
- Target learners’ first direct encounter with elearning – We didn’t want to overwhelm the learners, neither the faculty nor the students, with difficult instructions or unnecessary interactivity. That being said, the percentage of interactive pages (non-navigational) in each course was still high, about 80%, the rest were animated.
All content was kept original except where stated in either the body of the text or explicit attribution.
A player-less look of the programs (from the student’s course):
At some point though, the qualifiable teams were bought over by another company. Their agenda changed. The new company did not seem to want to engage their new resources in what they may have considered to be a low profit project. Learning Median was taken out of the loop informally and instead of appointing agreed upon experts and following a scheduled review cycle the programs were sent to the client without scheduled reviews along with a new approach document. The client rejected these deliverables and the project was lost. No appropriate salvage attempt, that we were made aware of, was initiated either; apart from an attempt from Learning Median.
Lots of lessons learned – want to find out more about them ? comment!