2020 in a nutshell
We are a week away from ending this atypical year, a lot has happened since we started January 1st. For starters, we were hit by the pandemic, which is something that is still going on and unfortunately, it’ll keep going for the time being. In consequence, I believe we saw this pandemic impact the digital realm, since more and more companies moved their services to cater to their customers in an online platform.
As an eLearning developer, there are a few lessons learned I’d like to highlight:
Increase in eLearning. In previous years, we saw and even discussed potential projects with many companies, and concluded that not all of them were ready to make the jump and migrate their training to online platforms, mostly because of fear and costs. Fear, because they weren’t sure online training was going to render the same effectiveness as classroom based training, and cost, because these companies didn’t have a clear scope of what entails to create online training, so they weren’t sure about how to plan a budget for this kind of initiative. As a result of the pandemic, many companies saw necessary to make the investment and implement online training to keep their businesses going while being in compliance. Even institutions in the education sector, needed to transcend their physical scope and launch many of their programs through their online platforms, not only allowing them to fulfill their commitment to current students but also allowing them to reach other corners of the planet and have more international students. Such is the case of one of our valued clients, Centennial College.
At the same time, I saw a reduction of development time in the projects in general, mostly because of the urge of these companies to launch their online training, so this had a huge impact in my workflow as a developer, demanding me to modify and improve my personal workflow of eLearning development.
New tools. For the best part of a decade, I mostly relied on tools like Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate, to develop eLearning modules. However, this year I was introduced to other tools that helped a lot in my projects, such as H5P and Nearpod, for creating interactions, and Padlet, for collaborative learning. I was also introduced to Brightspace (or D2L), as a learning platform for colleges and got to combine it with the interactive tools previously mentioned.
I hope this year, regardless of its difficulties, was productive for you as well. Merry Christmas and Happy new year!
