Timing the creation - screen per minute

I recently read at the msn forum for Instructional Designers that the ball park figure (at least accepted within the closely knit group of content mangers) for arriving at the number of screens read by a learner is one per 60 seconds.

I remember to have used this number for calculating the number of frames in my earlier e-learning projects. I was anyways wanting to validate my assumption. The number may not be entirely true with all e-learning modules. It however provides a starting point for estimating the effort involved in creating such modules.

Note that this number comes with some related assumptions, such as the rate of animation and interactivity. Typically any assessment screen would vary between 60 to 90 seconds based on the size and difficulty level of the question.

More to come...

Timing the creation

Estimating the time required to create content is definitely the most important and the most difficult thing to do at the beginning of any project. In all the forum discussions and seminars, most of the project managers I meet have one question on how do we estimate the time for an hour of instruction (either instructor-led or electronic).

While I personally feel that there is no thumb rule available (to the best of my knowledge), there are definite parameters, such as intensity of graphics, interactivity and frames/pages to be considered to arrive at the estimate. (long sentence, phew)

I have blogged this thought now. I would delve on it for the next few days to arrive at some guidelines that can help me and those who share my platform. Any comments?

KMS and LMS go together

Knowledge management has been on top of the wish list for many companies including mine. I see that there are various tools available for knowledge management, such as Lotus Notes or even Wiki (which I have been using for some time now).

Again, LMS is another area that has plenty of tools to manage Learning/Learning Content. There is a wide range from freeware, such as the Moodle to high performance LCMS, such as the Clicks, LMS and LCMS have taken the industry by storm. No doubt.

I have personally heard of ideas to marry LMS and KMS (that's a great idea and would sound music to many content managers like me). I hear people talk about such products already available in the market but I do not get to hear any big names using it.

If I were to pick one up for my team the following are the keys I would look for.
1. The LKMS (naming the new system for convenience) should pick topics from the knowledge banks already existing as databases.
2. The system should provide key roles for content managers, authors, and viewer/learners.
3. Every learner should be tracked for hours of usage, modules visited and bookmark.
4. The system should support online assessment with instant reporting and result management.

I would look forward to one soon to hit the market. I shall key my notes on such a tool when I get my hands on it someday.

Seeing Reason

I was talking to one of the school teachers who had attended a training program on effective pedagogy. She shared with me her experience on learning how to use project-based learning techniques to integrate technology with basal subjects.

We were discussing about the technique called Seeing Reason which is considered to be an effective method to teach students to analyse and learn concepts. This method sounds closer to the causal analysis and Pareto. I'm yet to test it myself. For more information visit http://www.intel.com/education/seeingreason/