Screencasts (aka screen capture movies)

Screen capture movie software (the “screencast” recorder) has been around for at least a decade. In essence, screencast recorders are virtual computer-screen camcorders. You install them and let them run in the background. When you want to record your onscreen activity, you press ‘record’ (usually a hotkey) and continue working. When you’re finished, you press ‘stop’ (another hotkey) and a full-motion movie of your activity is stored to disk. If you wish, you can record sound as well, most likely in the form of a running commentary spoken into the PC’s microphone. While there are many screencast programs on the market, iPOV has had good experience with the stability and value offered by BBFlashback and the features and performance of Camtasia.

Public screencast examples are everywhere. YouTube is full of them. So, wouldn’t you expect to see widespread use in large companies and organizations for internal IT training? That just seems to be starting. I suspect that there are at least 4 contributing reasons why it doesn’t seem to be as common as we would expect:

• Lack of Awareness – Screencast software is a surprising well-kept secret. We can’t count the number of times that we have spoken to programmers, program managers, and CIOs that don’t know even they exist. If we point them to examples on YouTube, they say: “I wondered how that was done”.
• Camera Shyness – It takes a certain amount of guts to record a movie that has your voice on it. What if you misspeak? What if you have a squeaky voice? What if you have a thick accent? All sorts of things can go wrong that will make you more nervous. Then you will make more mistakes and get even more nervous. Then you will give up.
• Lack of searchability – It takes time to demonstrate a complex software operation. Ten, twenty or thirty minutes is not uncommon. How many potential users have the patience to watch that much video to get an answer to a question? The problem is not getting to the right spot (most screencasts have tracker bars), the problem is knowing there is a right spot to get to. If only you could search the screencasts the way you search Google.
• No place to store them – Screencast movie files have gotten a lot smaller – but many are still too big to attach to corporate emails. That means that you need to put them on a web server or CD. If you accumulate a large collection, you will be talking gigabytes. Then how do you move them or find them. That brings us back to the searchability concern.

Until someone finds a way to overcome these issues, they will unfairly delay the adoption of this powerful and exciting technology.

Some Links with ideas:

• BB Flashback (free recorder and/or commercial editor)
• Techsmith Camtasia Studio (commercial recorder and editor)
• Jing (free recorder, but limited to 5 min run time)
• Screencast Software Comparison

Dual Monitor

With dual monitor support, you can hook up a second monitor and expand your laptop or desktop to double its size. This will give you enough screen real estate to support two applications that are fully open and functional. The application to the problem statement at the start of this diary should be obvious. With two monitors, you can open your application on one screen and the help window on the other. You can copy and paste from one to the other in one quick motion. You can read instructions in the help file as you follow them in the application.

Every notebook computer built in the past 5 years has built-in support for an external monitor. For desktop computers, you may have to add an inexpensive video card and a second monitor. The total one-time cost is typically less than $150 per seat. The return on that investment for a learner will be huge. Nonetheless, this capability is just starting to get the attention it deserves. You will find dual monitor setups in many software development shops and especially on trading floors, but not in most ordinary offices. Since there is no obvious drawback, it seems to be mainly an issue of awareness – and occasionally bureaucracy. One large company told me that all their IT support was outsourced to a 3rd party computer services firm. The service firm charged $100 per month for each monitor that it deployed!

Nevermind.

If, however, the PTB (powers that be) allow you to experiment with ways to achieve much higher productivity at a minimal cost, here are some additional tools and articles with more ideas for multiple monitors:

• Five Free Tools
• MultiMonitor FAQ
• Multi-Screens (banks of monitors)

“We are trying to get traction for it as a service for what I believe to be a very badly underserved userspace: the no-man’s-land between people inside a corporate firewall and a closed community of stakeholders.”

Tony’s response, quite rightly, was to question my sanity. Of course, he was very polite about it:

“On the community side of things – I guess I’m surprised you say it’s underserved. My impression is there are lots of solutions, e.g., Ning.”

Umm. Yes.  Tony’s right. There are lots of solutions. I’ve had active accounts on Ning for at least 18 months and I went through the feature checklist. Technically, Ning will do most of the things that our CoSolvent Community Server can do, plus quite a few more. Other social networking tools are similar. Does that mean we’ve wasted two years on CoSolvent’s evolution? After a short recovery period, I realized that we developed CoSolvent around a set of assumptions and design concepts that we have not fully articulated – possibly even to ourselves. Now seems as good a time as any to set the record straight.

We designed CoSolvent Community Server (CCS) for business-oriented networking and video-sharing:

• We adopted a Windows folder operating metaphor that was as simple as possible so busy professionals could learn to use it.
• We designed CCS to operate with minimal hardware and software support because business networks need to reach all of the relevant stakeholders.
• We installed a rich underpinning of access controls, permissions and utilities so CCS can be molded to make workflows fluid and easy.

In many ways, CCS is like a box of Lego. The building blocks are individually simple, but they can be re-arranged to support a variety of practical business workflows.

What sort of ‘work’ network are we talking about?

We developed CoSolvent because we couldn’t find a reliable way move rich media (typically video) to and from the individual subject matter experts (SMEs) and managers among our various corporate training clients. Many of our corporate counterparts are not high-skill IT managers or experienced media folks. They are department managers, plant engineers, technicians and HR managers in big, security-conscious companies. They don’t have super-duper IT administrator privileges. They sometimes can’t even view YouTube. Yet, they’re the subject matter experts that we needed to share stuff with.

Our network collaborators are not really friends or social acquaintances. They are buyers and we are the vendor. It’s not about being social, its about the work. The work is the center of our network universe.

We needed a pragmatic tool for ‘work’ networking, not an engaging site for a ‘social’ networking.

Of course, if an existing social networking tool could double as a reasonable ‘work networking’ platform, we could avoid reinventing the wheel. If we could make Facebook or Ning, etc. do the job, that would be good enough. Unfortunately, there were a number of issues that gave us pause:

• The companies that employ our target audience strongly discourage employees from putting company assets on ‘public’ sites. If we wanted to use a Ning, we would have to convince their employer that it was safe. If we don’t control it and our client doesn’t control it, that’s a really tough sell to corporate IT.
• Workers often didn’t want their co-workers to see their materials until they had a chance to approve them. Can you put a video in Ning and ensure that only chosen co-workers (out of the larger community) can see it? Probably. Can you teach an IT-challenged manager how to do it and be sure that they won’t make a mistake? Can you make them feel confident that they won’t make a mistake? Not so easy.
• People often work with collections of related, but dissimilar materials. Most projects involve some video, some supporting text documents, possibly some audio files, some spreadsheets, etc. How could we keep those together and manage them in an orderly fashion in Ning or Facebook? We might do OK with Google Docs, but what about commenting and video handling?
• We wanted to accommodate all types of video as input. For example, there are scenarios where it is really convenient if our correspondents can upload and view SWF files. For security reasons, Ning, Facebook and Youtube will never let that happen because Flash animations can contain actionscript.
• It is hard to guarantee 100% access to a public social networking site – especially with IT-challenged users. The sponsors of Facebook or Ning don’t need 100% individual access for their sites to be successful. They engineer their software to make it as easy as possible, but ultimately they won’t care if a specific individual has an archaic browser or a vicious spam filter. However, if you want to network real work, 100% access is critical. If an individual can’t use the system, you must still do business. You will have to set up costly workarounds that can wipe out all of the productivity gains that the networking tool might offer.

If I try to frame our view of the contrasting demands in a diagrammatic form, it would look something like this:

A Social Network User participation is voluntary. People join because they gain something on an individual level – possibly for their career, but ultimately for their personal benefit. If, for any reason, a given individual user cannot fully participate, the server’s Sponsor may care – but not too much.	A Work Network A commercial Sponsor wants a safe, virtual space where all business stakeholders can participate – to do their job. A  ‘stakeholder community’ (e.g., a supply chain, an association, or a school) can span many individuals and organizations across the public Internet.

But the biggest problem:

A lot of real-world business ‘workflow’ isn’t person-centric.

Social networking tools are designed around the individual user. A user typically logs into ‘My Page’. From there, the user can engage other individuals, join groups of other individuals and share media with other individuals. They can form new clubs and groups with other individuals. However, at the end of the day, the individual is still the center of the universe.

Business interactions are often not about the individual. They may be more naturally expressed as company-to-company, department-to-company, project-to-consultant, or buyer-to-seller interactions. In fact, there can be any number of different central actors, some human and some organizational, in a working business network. Sure, you could start everything from the individual and build the structures for the other entities, but that is just the long way round. Why not establish a Lego-like structure that can be reconfigured to support the workflow directly?

There are lots of other issues and considerations, but we decided that we were looking at a problem that wasn’t really social. It was more pragmatic and utilitarian and commercial. We looked at a lot of possible solutions and finally decided to roll our own. We developed CoSolvent Community Server. There is a thorough technical description elsewhere on our website. However, Tony’s question reveals that our market positioning explanations are still not clear or adequate. So, until we can remedy the main site, let me try to summarize and clarify the concept of CCS:

• CCS is a web-based file sharing tool with a suite of extra features. Folders can be labeled anything the user wants. Any ‘social’ tools are slaved to the folder metaphor. For example, groups are formed by giving them defined permissions and their own folder structure.
• The Windows folder metaphor is easily customized to fit a wide variety of access schemes and workflows. The goal is flexibility and simplicity. We want to fully streamline the average worker’s collaborative experience – without adding extra navigation and structural complexity.
• It is designed to be maximally accessible by a wide range of users.  CCS works with minimal client-side requirements: low to modest bandwidth, web browser, and Flash. It has proven adept at reaching behind firewalls, to users  with Macs, to workers in other countries, etc. While CCS makes it easier, achieving 100% access will ultimately depend on the willingness of stakeholders, technical people, iPOV and community developers to work together.
• It is optimized for the exchange of video materials. The potential of video as a day-to-day business communication tool has barely been tapped. In the wild, video clips exist in a dizzying array of types and it is hard to share them without performing conversions and extra processing steps that most people don’t want to learn. CCS directly supports a wide variety of video types.
• It is designed to be quickly set up and hosted on a vanilla installations. Currently, all of our working installations are in Amazon’s EC2 electronic cloud. We can set up a new, totally dedicated, site in minutes, while piggy-backing on Amazon’s security infrastructure.

Another way to grasp the difference between CSS and a  typical social network is to look at some practical application scenarios.

Target Applications – Camera Based

Small, inexpensive, easy-to-use solid-state cameras burst on the scene 3 or 4 years ago. Examples include the Flip camera, the RCA SmallWonder, the Sanyo Xacti series and the Kodak Zi series, along with many, many, many others. That doesn’t even count the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone camera.  Surely there ought to be a way to apply these new tools in day-to-day business operations.

Scenario 1 – Confidential Quality Review

A corporate quality manager (CQM) uses CCS to get video reports of defects and problems from far-flung plants. Security is crucial. The CQM doesn’t want anyone (not even his VP) to see the videos before he has a chance to review and assess them. At the plant level, only the plant quality manager (PQM) is allowed to record and upload this type of video. We  can set up a folder arrangement in CCS as shown in the following diagram:

1. The PQM for Plant #5  makes a video (or possibly a still photo) of the problem. The PQM places the media in a special ‘defect report’ folder  that is visible only to the PQM
2. The ‘defect report’ folder is actually just a link to a real folder for Plant #5 that resides within the corporate quality area. That folder is visible only to the PQM and the CQM.
3. When the file arrives in the CQM’s Plant #5 folder, the CQM receives an automatic email notification that a defect report has arrived from Plant #5.

The CQM can take several actions. He/she can phone the Plant #5 PQM and discuss the problem. Having the video as a common talking point will likely speed discussion and resolution. The CQM can move the video file out of the hidden folder to the general area – possibly into a folder of known issues. If the CQM adds a comment with suggested remedies (or records and uploads a video), there is now a permanent record of the problem and the fix.

Scenario 2 – Getting Action from a Supplier

The receiving manager gets a shipment that is badly packaged. If he spends the next few days on the phone, he might get the supplier’s attention. CCS may be able to elicit a better response – if we set up folders so he can easily send a video to the supplier. One possible structure is illustrated in the following diagram:

1. The receiving manager spots a problem with the way a shipment is packaged. He/she records a short video to demonstrate and document the problem and uploads it to Supplier A’s ‘public folder’ on the CCS. The public folder is a special type of folder (designated with a yellow icon) that doesn’t require a login for any of the items that it contains.
2. The supervisor at Supplier A receives an email with a link to the video in the public folder. The supervisor just clicks the link to view the video.
3. The receiving manager follows up with a phone call to discuss the problem. Since both parties have viewed the video of the problem shipment, the issue is resolved quickly and decisively.

The ‘public’ folder is the key to this scenario. It allows the receiving manager to send the video safely without requiring that the supplier be registered in the system. The CCS public folder system is smart enough to only allow the viewer to see a) the item at the link they were given, or b) if they were given a link to a folder, they can see any items and subfolders that the linked folder contains. By giving the folder a distinctive (yellow) label, CCS makes it easy for occasional users to know where files are public and where they are private.

• You can view a ‘made-up’ example in this folder on our demo CCS.

Target Applications – Screencasting Based

CCS can be used with free software tools to rapidly generate document and media reviews. The tools we use most often are the following:

• BB Flashback Express – a free screencast recording program
• DemoHelper – a free program that draws on top of everything on the computer desktop (except that it automatically pauses running movies when you try to draw or write)

The basic idea behind the following examples is to make a screencast movie as you view and comment on documents or media in the CCS – then upload the movie of your commentary to CCS as a permanent record. With a little practice, this is much faster than trying to craft written comments – and typically much clearer.

Scenario 3 – Near-painless Media Review

We needed to get clients’ reviews of our work-in-process eLearning media. Client staff are busy and too-often unavailable. Plus they reside in a different city, so meetings are a chore. We can set up a folder structure with ‘Drop off’, ‘Review’, and ‘PickUp’ subfolders and show our clients how to use a free tool, BB Flashback Express, to record their comments. Now the review process goes like this:

1. We place the material for review in the client’s folder in the CCS.
2. We email the SME a link to the material that is up for review (or they get an automatic email notification if they have subscribed to the folder).
3. The SME starts BB Flashback Express to make a screencast of their review.
   • The reviewer opens the link to the viewable media and starts to watch.
   • Whenever they see something of note, they can pause the media, use their mouse to point out the feature and add a verbal commentary.
   • When they have finished their review, they can add any general comments, or cycle back through the media to add second thoughts.
4. The SME saves their screencast as a Flash file and upload it to CCS beside the media that was reviewed. They don’t even have to export their comments as Flash. They can just upload the raw BB Flashback file and we will replay it on our end. If there are any written materials (e.g., supplementary documents or comments), they can upload them or write them in the same folder as the reviewed material.

That’s it. We are finding that our clients can often review a 20 minute eLearning lesson in about half an hour. It takes us a bit longer to listen to their review, but there is seldom any confusion about their request. That means that our overall time investment is reduced. Win-Win.

Scenario 4 – Lightning Fast Essay Grading

I and several of my staff are currently teaching or have recently taught university-level courses where we had to grade student papers. Oh boy is that fun. However, we are trying a new approach. CCS can be configured so each registered user (aka student) gets their own private folder – just like any social networking tool:

1. We ask students to submit their papers as PDFs so we can view them directly online in CCS.
2. We automatically get an email when each file arrives.
3. We use BB Flashback and Demohelper to mark up the paper and record our verbal comments.
4. When we finish, we save the movie as an SWF and upload it into the student’s private folder beside their essay.

If the student followed our advice and ‘subscribed’ to their folder, they will receive an automatic email as soon as our comment video file has finished uploading. We can even log in with different browsers and upload a video in the background while we record the next video in the foreground. If we want to add text, say to suggest a rephrasing, we can cut, paste and edit text from the PDF to the CCS commenting utility. Bottom line, we can read, comment and grade an essay in just slightly longer than it would normally take to simply read the paper version. With 30, 50 or 60 students in a class, we like that idea. It gives a much better audit trail and, considering my atrocious chicken-scratch handwriting, the students probably learn more.

Scenario 5 – Commissioning Graphics at a Distance

We get our graphics done by a variety of designers. Some are local. Some work half a world away. However, iPOV often needs graphics done the same day or overnight. How can we do that with a designer in, say, Russia? An iPOV staff member typically records a short video to explain what they need. The camera arrangement is simple and cheap (under $250):

With this crude rig, we can record a 5-7 minute video to explain what we want. Even though we may be abysmal artists, we can make stick-figure drawings and explain our intent and requirements as we go. In a video, we can give far more context and rationale than we would ever have the patience  to put in a written specification. After the artist uploads a draft, we can comment in CCS. Sometimes we use BB Flashback Express and/or Demohelper to make a short screencast movie of our verbal comments – using the mouse as a pointer. That way the artist knows exactly which feature we are talking about. We can go back and forth several times in a day, although usually one or two cycles with the video comments are sufficient.

• You can view the sequence of a typical design process laid out in this folder on our CCS Demo site.

Summary

We designed CoSolvent Community Server for business-oriented networking and video-sharing. We adopted a Windows folder operating metaphor to make it as familiar as possible to the busy professionals that must learn to use it. We designed CCS to operate with minimal hardware and software support because business networks need to reach all of the relevant stakeholders. Finally, we added a rich underpinning of access controls, permissions and utilities so that we can mold CCS to make the workflows fluid and easy – especially for the tasks that make or save money for the sponsoring organization. In some ways, CCS is similar to a box of Lego. The building blocks are individually simple, but they can be re-arranged to support a variety of practical business workflows.

It’s possible that someone could customize Ning, or HiveLive, or SharePoint, or Google Docs, or … to work like CCS. However, we don’t think these tools were conceived for that purpose and it seems like it would be a force fit. I’m sure that others will pick up on the CCS idea and address this application space. Until then, we believe that our target market is still a bit ‘underserved’.

• Getting the knowledge out of the expert’s brain
• Embedding the knowledge in the learner’s actions
• Everything in between

Worse, these are intimately related. When experts and learners are at a distance from one another, it is incredibly easy to miscommunicate. It is equally easy for the message to get misplaced on the way. To combat this, instructional designers have developed a meticulous methodology to guarantee that the knowledge leaves and arrives safely. However, as change drives education and training to respond more quickly, that attention to detail is under stress. Increasingly, it looks like we are facing a choice: fast,  good and cheap- pick two.

How can you deliver knowledge efficiently?

While it seems new to the eLearning community, this dilemma is not unique. Goods producing industries and service industries have faced this challenge for decades. They have also found ways to resolve the conflict and deliver quality, speed and value. So why not approach the problem the way that Toyota makes cars? Why not adapt the principles of “lean thinking” to the knowledge supply chain – end to end. That takes some new ways of thinking and thinking about some new things.

The Principles of Lean Systems

The concept of a ‘lean’ business processes is at least a century old. Many credit Henry Ford’s Rouge River factory in the 1920s as the first major business process that was seriously lean. A ship with iron ore unloaded at one end of the plant and steel smelted from its ore emerged in the Model A automobiles at the other end. Nothing was allowed to impede the smooth progression from raw material to finished vehicle. In the years since, Ford’s vision has been refined. Now, many operations experts consider the Toyota Production System to be the gold standard for lean. For my taste, Spear and Bowen’s definition of Toyota’s approach reduces Toyota’s success to four key principles:

1. All work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing and outcome.
2. Every customer-supplier connection must be direct and there must be an unambiguous yes-or-no way to send requests and receive responses.
3. The pathway for every product and service must be simple and direct.
4. Any improvement must be made in accordance with the scientific method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible level in the organization.

Source: Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System, Steven Spear and H. Kent Bowen, Harvard Business Review, Sept 1999, p98

Lean processes are not unique to automobile manufacturing, or even to manufacturing in general. They can occur in a wide range of businesses, from supply chains, to services, to the military, and even healthcare. The essential ingredient is the passion to apply and follow sound system design principles. There are several versions of the principles. In their 1996 book Lean Thinking, James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones outlined five principles, which I would paraphrase as follows:

1. Determine the customer’s definition of value.
2. Identify all of the steps in the process and determine their contribution to customer value.
3. Remove any avoidable steps that don’t create value. Redesign the process to eliminate currently unavoidable steps that don’t add value. Arrange the residual value-creating steps into a transparent, integrated flow.
4. Let customers pull valued items from the system – replacing them only as needed.
5. Pursue perfection in the process through continuous improvement.

Adapted from Womack and Jones

A Lean Knowledge Supply Chain

To translate these concepts to the world of eLearning takes a bit of imagination. iPOV has been exploring this for nearly a decade. To this point, we have identified a short list of critical tasks that have to be done:

• Visualize the entire supply chain: Think about the entire journey that knowledge must take from the expert’s brain to the learner’s actions. Don’t just think about how is managed, or how it is delivered, or how it is assessed. Those are all important parts. But they are not the whole journey. In order to improve the process, you must understand how the different tasks flow together and how an upstream task can impact a task far downstream.
• Identify opportunities to create ‘standard work’: It seems counter-intuitive that anything involving knowledge could be subject to standardization. However, while the knowledge itself is highly varied, the package containing it doesn’t need to be. Consider a training video. It doesn’t matter what the camera saw. In a movie, it is all reduced to a sequence of image frames played at 30 frames per second. Once it is a movie, an Einstein lecture is processed the same as a Madonna concert. You can’t standardized the content of the video, but you can standardize the processes that handle and distribute it.
• Measure the flow time: How long does the whole journey take? How long does it take to pin down the SME? How long does it take to get them to write/review the knowledge? How long does it take to get approvals? How long does it sit before it is released? How long does it take to schedule learners to view it? How long does it take to measure the effect? How long does it take for the results of those measures to filter back to the start of the process? If you don’t understand where the time is going, there is no way to pull it back.
• Identify and isolate the waste: This could be a blog article by itself (and probably will). In our optimized, technical world, it is really hard to find any process that is as wasteful as the one that delivers industrial knowledge. Delays, mistakes, rework, overwork, lack of attention, distractions, and misunderstandings are legion. Name an eLearning development and delivery project that didn’t undergo at least 4 or 5 edit cycles. To remove this waste, you must first identify it, label it, and understand it. Only then will you be able to get mad about it and do something to eliminate it.

iPOV has proven again and again that, if you can address these issues, you can develop high quality eLearning materials in record time. We love talking about how we do it. We love talking with other folks that are trying to do it too.

“describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and
then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can
use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice”

Alexander, C. et al. (1977) A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction, New York: Oxford University Press.

Alexander proposed that designers seldom create designs from scratch. Instead, they recognize that the similarities between their problem and previous problems and the similarities that should be applied in proposed solutions. Alexander’s idea has since been eagerly adopted by software designers.

eLearning Design Patterns

In 2005, the European E-Len Project produced a report on 34 possible applications of design patterns to eLearning. Unfortunately, the underlying project has been closed – possibly because many of their “patterns” turned out be fairly obvious and trivial to any experienced teacher: e.g.,

• Management of on-line
  questionnaires
• “Management of on-line questionnaires”
• “Moderation of asynchronous online groups”
• “Student interaction in groups”

An older, but arguably more interesting, model can be found at The Pedagogical Patterns Project. This links to an effort that seemed to fade in the mid 2000s that produced a set of far more interesting design patterns. Many of these were aimed at classroom teaching, but they illustrate the ability to define a problem and pose a generalizable and believable solution pattern. Consider the following example from a book submission that the authors provide on their website:

SHOT GUN SEMINAR *
This pattern was originated by Alan O’Callaghan

You wish to have a group of learners discuss the results of literature research of diverse topics.

❊❊❊

A typical technique to broaden a group of learners understanding of a field or topic is to have them research the topic and select one learner to report back to the group as a whole via a presentation. Often this results in a good presentation, but poor discussion, as only the presenter is fully motivated to do the research.

[details omitted]

❊❊❊

Therefore, identify a topic for research and encourage everyone in the group to research the topic. Choose the presenter by random ballot at the beginning of the scheduled presentation time. Restrict the timing for the initial delivery.

[details omitted]

❊❊❊

Shotgun Seminar recognizes that learners are typically motivated by the fact that they are presenting rather than by the intrinsic nature of the research topic. By selecting the presenter at the start of the seminar itself, every attendee is equally motivated to do the research, and is equipped to enter the discussion opened by the presenter. The overall benefit of a successful application of the pattern, especially on a regular basis, in a regular time slot, is strongly beneficial to the development of a research culture.

[details omitted]

This “design pattern” is practical and widely applicable, yet devoid of any assumptions about the specific subject matter of the class. It could be applied equally to a course in psychology, engineering or business. This gives it tremendous power and utility.

We have been following this concept for some time. On the face, it seems to promise tremendous time and cost savings. We even tried to write and apply a few design patterns of our own:

• HareAndTortoise – Pattern for situations where expert can do task quickly, but explanations are lengthy. The pattern calls for making two videos: a) one that is the expert at full speed to show how it is done, and b) one that is long and thorough so a learner can understand the implicit logic.
• StoryBehindTheStory – Pattern for situations where a new corporate policy may encounter resistance. The pattern calls for an authoritative figure to record a short (30-45 sec.) war story explaining the issue or threat that caused the policy to be adopted. This video is played as an introduction to motivate interest and compliance.

Despite our efforts, we consistently hit a major roadblock. It doesn’t help if we follow a design pattern and our clients don’t. Unless we can get our clients to recognize, understand and respect the pattern, they will do what clients usually do. They will toss us material and tell us to sort it out. Worse, they may try to apply their own conception of a design pattern and ‘help’ us by delivering raw materials in that form. We are always begging our customers not to help us.

Reluctantly, we have come to the conclusion that design patterns are a fantastic idea that will never catch on – at least until there is broader industry collaboration on the construction and maintenance of these patterns. What if the commercial training and eLearning industry were to embrace eLearning design patterns? What if a group of major vendors and eLearning consumers got together and built a library of these documents? Imagine a world where eLearning buyers and vendors had conversations like these:

• “We need a course that is mostly StoryBehindTheStory, but with a few JustTheFactsMa’am patterns”
• “I think we can deliver what you want using mainly the HareAndTortoise pattern – with a Flash animation Roadmap on the front for guidance.”

Oh well, one can dream.