“What’s love got to do with it?”

- apologies and admiration to Tina Turner

Last week I used the word “Love” to describe the attention to detail required to build a quality e-learn. I later wondered whether the term was a bit “over the top” for readers. Was I portraying my passion for all things ‘e’ with a little too much exuberance? Would anyone know what ’love’ meant in relation to e-learning quality?

I don’t think I have ever met a person working with e-learning who has not been passionate about the medium and the opportunities that learning technologies can and will avail our staff, our learners. But we need to have a little more than passion. We need to understand what quality looks like, how quality is experienced, so that we know how to pay attention to detail during development.

Sometimes it is the people around us that don’t understand the time and effort required to develop an e-learn – the trial and error required to learn the authoring tool – the stretch often required to see beyond the content to find ways to create meaningful activities and scaffold the learning.  Like any multimedia production, e-learning requires good scripting and good visuals to enable a learner to learn through the e-learn. As learning professionals we need time to give e-learning the love and attention it needs to become ‘quality’.

However you can, ensure to work with your reporting manager to get the support you need to create quality e-learns.

And, be an e-learning advocate and ensure poor quality e-learning doesn’t creep onto your Learning Management System (LMS).