Tom Kuhlmann (who writes Tom's Blog for Articulate users) tells an inspiring story of a piece of e-learning created over a weekend. Rapid e-learning, indeed. 

And it was rapid with good reason. The company producing it had several manufacturing facilities working 24/7. On this particular weekend, there was a serious accident at one of the facilities and an employee died. 

The safety team (of two) quickly got to work, creating pieces of content (including video footage), to highlight the sequence of events that led to the loss of life and remind people of the safety rules they needed to follow to avoid a recurrence. 

12 hours later, the site safety manager had pulled this all together into a piece of refresher e-learning, distributed to all manufacturing facilities across the company. 

Imagine how long that could've taken with the involvement of a large, corporate e-learning development team?

The final output from the site safety manager may not have been perfect, but it met the organisation's needs at a critical moment.

This story brings home a hugely important point it's easy to forget - especially if you work in a large organisation

Organisations are not interested in creating a piece of e-learning, per se, but in meeting a specific organisational goal. E-learning is simply one way of helping achieve that goal. 

So at the very start of your e-learning development process, it's always a good idea to step away from the solution and focus on the organisational goal. This gives you the opportunity to assess the best learning solution to meet the goal. 

Is it actually e-learning that you need? If yes, what kind of e-learning does it need to be? Is it something that can be quickly pulled together using just a simple authoring tool?  Or does it genuinely need to be more complex, with custom programming involved?

This simple assessment can potentially save you many hours of wasted effort and many thousands of pounds of mis-directed budget.  Use your resources as and when appropriate. Save the big, expensive, time-consuming resources only for when you absolutely need them.

And, of course, if you are a team of just one or two, you won't be thinking about how much of your vast resource or budget to allocate. 

Instead, your focus will be about how to create the best e-learning you can, which meets the organisational goal and is still achievable within your very restricted resources, budget and time.

Spend a fast-paced day thinking differently about your e-learning (rapid or otherwise). Attend our Creating Boredom Busting E-Learning public course. Details here...