Contracting in the Learning Space

Over the last year I have seen more and more companies looking to bring on eLearning consultants instead of hiring full time employees.  Many learning professionals may consider this a blessing after the work doldrums of ’09, but before you jump into the ocean of contracting, you should make sure you understand some of the advantages and pitfalls of Contracting in the Learning Space.

Given the difficulty of finding new business for many contractors, it is common for contractors to find work through recruiters.   Before you sign a contract with a recruiter, there are a number of advantages and disadvantages that you should be aware of.

1. As a consultant, you need to know the vast majority of recruiters are not knowledgeable about eLearning or the training industry.  When you respond to a post on Dice, the recruiter is unlikely to know anything beyond what is in the post.  This means that you will not have a solid understanding of the work needed until you talk with the end client.  Unfortunately, the recruiter will require an hourly rate you are willing to work for, so you will need to have a number you are comfortable with regardless of job requirements.  Also, keep in mind the recruiter is going to bill the client significantly (often 35% or greater) more than any rate you accept.
2.  Recruiters want to make sure the time they spend getting clients and contractors is worthwhile, so they will only take on certain types of projects.   Usually they will only take projects that are 8 hours a day with a minimum commitment of several months.  This means that clients often will only work with recruiters for a project they can keep you constantly working on, such as converting hundreds of courses to a new eLearning tool.  These types of projects often will not be as rewarding as projects or clients you develop yourself.
3. Most projects will require you to work on site.  Even with eLearning and distance learning solutions becoming more and more accepted, many companies do not feel comfortable with you creating these solutions remotely.  This means you will often only be able to accept contracts at location geographically near your location.
4. Recruiters usually respond to a client’s request to fill a specific position.  They do not propose solutions or teams to complete a project more efficiently.  If you are working on a project and see a potential side project, unless it is filled with another contractor, the recruiter is unlikely to pursue the possible project.  Fixed bid projects or more complex team solutions are unlikely to be pursued by the recruiter and you do not have the ability to pursue these projects on your own.
5. Once you have signed the contract, the recruiter owns the client relationship.  You will be locked into partnering with the recruiter for any work related to that client for, usually, a year after the end of your current contract.  If the project requirements change or the client wants you to work on other projects, they need to go through the recruiter to make these changes.  This can be cumbersome at times, especially if the recruiter is not versed in the learning space.
6. Not all recruiters are the same.  There are a number that focus on the learning space, some that perform more project based solutions, and a few smaller shops that may have greater flexibility.  Working with these types of recruiters will often be easier because they can better describe the position and understand the type of solutions that are possible.  They may also be more flexible on the terms of the contract or solution.

There are some alternatives to using recruiters to keep work coming, but they are probably not going to be as prolific as using the job boards (and recruiters).  Working in conjunction with other contractors/consultants or small consulting companies may give you flexibility that you are unlikely to get from a larger organizations.  You are likely to be able to get better contract terms and find more interesting projects.

As the learning market improves, contractors need to find effective ways to engage with recruiters, as well as other organizations, to keep working.  The best way to make sure that the experience is positive is to have a solid understanding of the process of working with recruiters.

Adobe Learning Suite – There is more than just Photoshop, Flash, and Captivate (Part 2)

In this conclusion to our examination of Adobe’s secondary eLearning tools, I will look at the last of the Adobe eLearning Suite support tools: the Flash Learning Interactions templates.

Flash CS4 Learning Interactions

Flash Learning Interactions are a set of question templates used to build out course assessments or knowledge checks.  During my initial search for supporting documentation, it became clear that Adobe has run afoul of the same problem that they have with CourseBuilder, a lack of clear documentation and support.  Finding any documentation, that isn’t from the era of Macromedia, is an almost futile endeavor.  Eventually, I found a link from an archived TechNote to a pdf that had some useful information on how to use learning interactions, as well as the other Adobe eLearning Suite extensions, to create quizzes.

After discovering this document and looking in-depth at the templates, it became apparent that these interactions are versatile and fairly easily to use.  There is also the Flash Quiz template that has several interactions, each on its own key frame, that illustrate how they function and this template can even be used as a standalone assessment.  It already contains basic scoring functionality and the afore mentioned document lists the APIs available to the learning interactions.  This makes it fairly easy to create custom assessments without having to build out all of the functionality from scratch.

Everything that I tested worked as advertised and it was easy to change question information and layout.  I could see using these templates for small scale assessment creation, but because the content is maintained within the interactions and requires all content to be updated manually in the swf, it would be time consuming, and impractical on a large scale, to make updates or changes to the course content.  Before using these in any production environment, I would recommend updating them to support content driven by XML files.

What is unclear to me is where or when a company would want to take advantages of these interactions.  They are only available when you purchase the Learning Suite, which already contains Captivate and Presenter and both are viable alternatives to the interactions.  If you are using Flash as a part of a larger scale solution or in conjunction with internal tools, you would want something more XML driven to allow course creators to quickly and easily update course content without having to go into every swf file.

In Summation

All three of these tools are clearly outliers to the primary applications that Adobe sells and none of them have the level of support that you would want to use them exclusively.  I had significant difficulty finding documentation for any of these tools and, I suspect if I ran into problem getting them to work, I would probably be on my own.  Also, I suspect that as they extend the functionality of Presenter and Captivate, there will be less of a place for these tools.  So, unless you are already a strong HTML or Flash programmer that enjoys building out your own tools, I would recommend not bothering with these extensions and focus more on their mainstream and better supported tools.

Adobe Learning Suite – It's more than just Photoshop, Flash, and Captivate (Part 1)

Ever since Adobe bought Macromedia, it has been the big player in eLearning tools.  In addition to their major applications, they are providing a number of smaller helper apps.  Since there are plenty of reviews on the main tools, I wanted to investigate some of the more specialized eLearning support tools that Adobe provides.

SCORM Packager

I can’t help but think Adobe missed the mark on this one.  This tool is delivered as part of the Captivate 4 product, but doesn’t require Captivate (or any other Adobe products) to work.  It provides the ability to package multiple published Captivate, Presenter, or other SCORM-enabled courses (such as Articulate courses) and create a single multi-SCO course package from them.  At first glance, this seems like it would be a useful application, but it fails to deliver on one essential point: it doesn’t support the SCORM 2004 sequencing and navigation functionality.  If you don’t have the ability to set up prerequisites or determine how a user will access the different SCOs, why would you want a multi-sco course?  Most LMSes provide far better access and course structure controls than this packager has.  So until Adobe updates – and increase the features of – this tool, it isn’t really worth the time.

Dreamweaver CS4 with CourseBuilder Extensions

I had looked at CourseBuilder a number of years ago and decided that it wouldn’t fit into our production process at the time.  I figured the best starting point was to look at the help files and run through the tutorial.  This is where I started to get a little concerned.  The more I looked into the supporting documentation, the more I concerned I got: first, the tutorial seemed to be out of date for the version of Dreamweaver it accompanied; then I noticed that many of the pages on scoring and data-tracking seemed to be missing.  So I figured I would search online for Adobe and CourseBuilder – this brought up more pages that referenced Macromedia than Adobe, which is all that needs to be said about priority that Adobe gives to the tool. 

Aside from that, CourseBuilder seemed to work fine (although I did not actually integrate a scored assessment and import it an LMS).  The layout and configuration made it possible to create fairly complex assessments.  Personally, I would prefer to leverage other learning tools, such as Adobe Flash or Articulate Presenter, but if you do not have access to the Flash player, the CourseBuilder extensions may provide an acceptable alternative.

To be continued…