Rapid Development

Here’s a nice statement from Donald Clark’s blog …

While I admire the efforts made by LINE Communications and Kineo to provide rapid development offers, we must be careful to see this as a useful service at the bottom end of the market and not the solution as a whole. It’s great that we can offer cheaper, faster content production by using smart tools, speedy processes and small teams. This is a very useful bottom layer in the market.

However, a toolbox doesn’t make you a builder, Word does not make a novelist, Excel doesn’t make an accountant, [and] PowerPoint doesn’t make a presenter. Rapid Development Tools are not what makes Rapid development work; it’s having experienced people who can fast-track the writing, build and process.

Let’s push on with making the page-turning, basic stuff cheaper and faster, but let’s, at the same time, make sure we have quality content in the upper layers of the market with simulations, games and scenario-based learning.

Kineo, the learning consultancy, has done some excellent work on rapid e-learning solutions, and they recommend some fantastic free tools for the job (surveymonkey, audacity, freemind, moodle), but I do agree with Donald and I particularly like the middle paragraph. The expression “Word does not make a novelist” is much more memorable than “rapid development does not necessarily make good learning” and will have a lot more meaning for those who are not familiar with our development processes or the importance of good Instructional Design.