eLearning Professionals And Their Duties
An eLearning project is never a single person’s job; there are numerous hands contributing backstage. It would be a great challenge to create good-quality learning experiences, the ones that meet the needs of the learner, without the right people involved. Therefore, it is important to understand the different roles and skills that constitute an eLearning team. Knowing the value each of these roles brings to the project helps us better understand the complexities and handle the challenges while working toward a shared goal.
eLearning Project Job Roles
Here’s a glimpse of the roles involved in an eLearning project. Let us understand each one better.
Project Sponsors
They are the key stakeholders who own the project. They generally have a clear vision of the “big picture,” (i.e., the final eLearning outcome). Thus, they take initiative and provide good direction to the team. At our company and with other learning vendors, these are typically the clients who approach us with their business needs and they want those to be addressed with a learning solution.
Subject Matter Experts (SME)
They essentially have authority over the content to be covered in the eLearning. They are the links that help us identify the right content that connects well with the target audience. During an eLearning project lifecycle, they serve as the knowledge banks that instructional designers leverage to understand the content. When working on highly technical or industry-specific topics, their guidance becomes even more crucial. Note that some projects may not have a subject matter expert at all, and the instructional designer may double up as the SME.
Project Managers
They are in charge of the smooth running of the project on a daily basis. Their impeccable planning and execution skills ensure the successful completion of the project lifecycle. In addition, it’s important for them to maintain a good rapport with the team members and keep up the team spirit to ensure timely deliveries of the intermediate milestones while galloping ahead toward the project launch date. A strong PM handles the various challenges that arise at the team level while successfully steering ahead toward the on-time completion of a project.
Instructional Designers
They apply their sound knowledge of instructional design principles, learning styles, and learning theories to transform the content identified by the SME into an effective blueprint of the eLearning to be developed. To this they also add the right dose of interactivities, animations, quizzes, and various other interesting elements to engage learners further, thus ensuring a successful knowledge transfer. In a smaller team or project, an instructional designer may be responsible for needs analysis, content research, content writing, collaboration with the development team, and the final successful execution of the project.
eLearning Architect And Developers
They work together to bring the vision to fruition. They convert blueprints provided by instructional designers into a tangible eLearning product. To this end, they may build the eLearning natively on the learning platform itself, or use eLearning authoring tools like Articulate 360, Articulate Rise, Lectora, Captivate, Camtasia, Adapt, etc., or build with various front-end web languages. The development team is responsible for the technical and creative execution of the learning asset.
Multimedia Designers
They add further engagement to this eLearning product by using their visual design skills. They use a variety of graphic tools to create immersive and interactive graphics and motion graphics that support the content to come up with a visually enhanced and aesthetically appealing eLearning module.
Voice Talents
They add a supporting layer of comprehension by describing the animations and adding value to the scenarios through conversations. Professional narration not only adds value for the auditory learners but also adds to the overall engagement of a well-built eLearning module.
QA Specialists
Last but not least are the QA specialists. They review the eLearning for content, clarity, consistency, graphics, language, appropriate references, and accessibility. A thorough review ensures fewer review cycles and the delivery of a quality product to the client.
Conclusion
You may skip one or more of these roles or add them up to a single person for smaller projects. On the other hand, larger and complicated projects may even require other roles, such as game designers, accessibility experts, animators, etc., to be added to the team. While every eLearning project is unique in its requirements, most projects require all of the above functions.
An amazing team brings diverse skills on the platter, thus resulting in creating stellar eLearning experiences.
