A report published in this weeks People Management outlines that many courses developed for e-learning appear to focus too heavily on presentational aspects rather than the more important issue of content.

Responses received from practitioners to a survey conducted by a DfEE funded report, highlighted that the most important skills needed were project management, graphic design and instructional design, leading to validation and evaluation appearing extremely low in the list of priorities.

The report also stated that there is currently a lack of good designers thus making the target set by the University for Industry (UfI) of making learning packages available to 2.5 million on-line learners by 2002, rather a difficult one to achieve.

Previous lessons learnt from producing multi-media and computer-based training in the past have not taken into consideration the need for good instructional design. It was stated that many samples of e-learning material received by UfI were proven to be ineffective.

Standards for analysis and instructional design have been set by the Institute of IT Training and some excellent courses do exist. However, because of the demand for e-learning material, the target will be a very demanding one to achieve owing to the numbers of people that need to be trained to meet deadlines in such a short time.