Have you just been assigned an elearning project? Ready to start planning the project. An essential component of planning an elearning project is figuring out the skill sets needed on your elearning team to complete the project.
Ready to pull together your team?
What skills do you need on your team to create quality elearning? How many people? Most large E-learning projects are carried out by multiple people. At Microassist we divide our elearning team into eight specific roles. Do you need eight people for your Elearning project? No. For smaller elearning a single person can take on multiple roles. However, when designing the project plan we keep the roles separate because it gives us more flexibility. We’ve also noticed that if we calculate costs by role they are more accurate.
Elearning Development Roles
The eight roles we use for project planning are:
- Subject Matter Expert (SME): The SME’s role is to provide content, resources and expert testimony. The SEM also checks the accuracy of all materials created by the rest of the Elearning team.
- Instructional Designer (ID): The instructional designer analyzes training needs, provides consultation on instructional strategies and techniques for elearning, analyzes content, defines scope and learning objectives, selects delivery format and assessment strategy based on client training goals while supporting their business needs.
- Online Developer: The online developer helps realize the instructional designer’s vision by using authoring tools to create elearning–usually for the web.
- Editor: Reviews Elearning materials for clarity, consistency of style, grammar, spelling, appropriate references and copyright information.
- Multimedia Specialists: The multimedia specialists, depending on the project, can include a graphic designer, voice actor, videographer or photographer. These people collaborate with the instructional designer to provide additional media that supports the ID’s design and objectives for the training.
- Information Technology (IT): IT manages all the technology aspects of E-learning including hosting, learning management systems, sign-on security, etc.
- Project Manager: The project manager manages the schedule, cost, scope and quality of the project by working with the project team and customer.
- Quality Assurance (QA): The quality assurance role assures that the Elearning developed meets the requirements and specifications set out for the project.
Do remember every team member does not have to be an in-house resource. We outsource certain specialties (such as Videographers). Our clients, frequently outsource the more technical roles to us (LMS Hosting and Management). The goal should be creating great elearning at a reasonable cost.
Related Articles
- Your Perfect Elearning Development Shop: An Individual or a Team?
- Questions to Ask Before Developing Training In-House
Contact our Learning Developers
Need to discuss developing e-learning? Creating curriculum for classroom training? Auditing and remediating e-learning for accessibility? Our learning developers would be glad to help.