Is it possible to transfer an industrial design process to the development of e-learning material? This is what I and a group of other European partners are going to try out using the VITAE course as a trial product. Earlier this week I made a very quick trip to Trondheim in Norway to attend the kick-off meeting of the UnderstandIT project which is supported in the Transfer of Innovation strand of the EU’s Leonardo program and to meet the people who I will be working with to trial CCeD.
CCD is concurrent design which is an approach to design that tries to involve all interested parties in design activities in the same room at the same time. This means that participants must have decision-making authority so that binding decisions can be taken during the session rather than waiting for permission and research into possibilities. It requires that CCD participants come well prepared to the sessions with an idea of what will be discussed, the challenges ahead and how these may be solved. The advantage of the process is that the development process is faster and implications can be explored immediately rather than somebody coming later to say ‘Ah well that will cause us problems because …’.
The CCD approach was pioneered by NASA when it needed to cut costs drastically and the group at HiST in Trondheim are exploring how it can be transferred to the development of e-learning materials, when it will become CCeD, Concurrent e-learning Design. During my visit to Trondheim, I and my fellow project partners were introduced to the room in which the process takes place, a high-tech center equipped with computers for all and multiple screens so that progress can be shared along the way. Each session lasts about three hours and is run by a facilitator who oversees the design process, picking up problems and decisions which need to be communicated to the room as a whole.
The HiST group have already had some success transferring this method to elearning development and have some national Norwegian companies as satisfied customers. But now they propose to take it one step forward by running the sessions online so that the dispersed European partner network of the project can develop a product together. So in the UnderstandIT project their challenge becomes whether this very intense process can be successfully translated to the online medium. As a veteran online conference and online meeting organiser I foresee few technical problems however I think the challenge will lie in maintaining the psychological momentum over such long periods. Three hours is a long time to be fully concentrated on your screen and we may have to come up with some tricks to make this more engaging.
But the aim is not simply to transfer CCeD online but also to see if we can come up with an effective business model for the elearning material which in this case is the VITAE course. This also interests me greatly as we are going to apply the methodology advocated by Osterwalder in Business Model Generation, a very attractive -looking book which explains a great deal through the use of visualisations. Appearances aside, the book also attempts to provide a business model which takes into account the Internet age which means that it should us come up with a viable business model for the VITAE course.
I’m very much looking forward to our online CCeD sessions which will start in January!