General Meeting, 8 April 2003

Earlier

Later

"Developing an E-learning Course: Lessons Learned "

—written by Rhonda Sussman

On April 8, ISO guru Ralph Robinson and customer service expert Carolyn Watt gave an informal and humorous presentation on their experience with putting a course online. Ralph and Carolyn are cofounders of the E-learning company Celerity Learning Solutions.

In 1999, Ralph and Carolyn decided to put Ralph’s course on ISO (a quality standard) online, since the technology now existed to reach more students than could be reached in a classroom.

The name of their company—Celerity—means “with speed.” For Ralph and Carolyn, the name reflects their intent. As Ralph said, “we offer learning solutions that give people a speedy way to learn.”

They identified a large, international audience for their course, since ISO 9000 is an international standard, and anyone who works in quality management would be interested in such a course, especially writers.

In developing and organizing the content, Ralph and Carolyn relied on two books, The WBT Cookbook, by Brandon Hall, and Designing Web-Based Training, by William Horton.

Most of what they said about design is familiar to technical writers. They talked about the importance of “chunking” the material. They stressed how important it is to create storyboards that help course designers think everything through and make sure that links are in place. The storyboards can then provide clear guidance to the people actually putting the e-learning material together.

The resulting course, ISOWrite, offers the student personal contact. Ralph and Carolyn provided exercises for each section. The students could submit them for a grade or for commentary first and then resubmit for grading. Ralph and Carolyn committed themselves to responding to a student within 24 hours.

After the presentation, there was a lively conversation about the usefulness of ISO. Ralph used the example of CD players to show why standardization was important—“you can take a Canadian CD, go to Japan and play it on any CD player there.”

For more information, visit www.celeritylearning.com.

	Carolyn Watt is the founder and president of CWA | The Customer Experience Company. She is active in the STC at the international level. More about Carolyn Watt
	Ralph Robinson is a senior member of the Toronto chapter and the founder of R**2 Innovations. He has dealt exclusively with ISO 9000 for the past several years and has published books on documenting ISO 9000 compliance. More about Ralph Robinson

Ralph and Carolyn are partners in Celebrity Learning.