Over the past few days I have had the need to learn a new software package. It has been an interesting few days. I now remember why I dislike learning new software and have disliked it for a long time. The package was Adobe InDesign, and while I may criticize Adobe a bit here, I would like to add that their heart seems to be in the right place, but the e-learning experience left much to be desired.
How it happened: I needed to know how the software worked, what it did and how it was different from PageMaker, so I downloaded an evaluation copy from the Adobe website. This was advertised as a fully functional copy of the program limited only by a 30 day license. I proceeded to load it on my PC. While this was happening I received an email from Adobe with several links that would help me evaluate the software. I clicked on a link which promised a feature tour.
The senior product manager for InDesign conducted the tour. I am sure he is very good at managing the product, but my focus here is on e-learning. The only real-world equivalent I can offer for this product tour training is this: Imagine you are explaining baseball to someone who has never seen a game. You first explain that there are 9 players on a side, and then, before explaining anything else and without any further prelude, you start explaining, in detail, the intricacies of the infield fly rule.
So, although the software seemed quite impressive from his explanation, I still had no idea how to use it, and in a larger sense, I did not really know what it did. Yes it was the next generation of PageMaker, but it did so much more than PageMaker they felt compelled to change the name. Cool, but I knew PageMaker; I did not know what constituted "more than PageMaker."
I next found a section of the website that offered basic instruction. (I should also note that the website has a great deal of help – so much help in fact that it borders on unhelpful trying to wade thru it all to find what you will think is useful for a given purpose). This section was helpful, but in a way that reminded me of how all software instruction is unhelpful – I found out about specific features of the program and how to do specific actions. The problem was that what I wanted was context, and the right amount of information.
I have taken multiple classes in a variety of software, some live, some on-line, some using a combination of the two, and some using e-Learning. For some reason all these classes are organized according to the progression of menu bar items in the software. That is, starting with "File" we learn what options the File menu offers, then move to "Edit" and then through the various menu options of the program. This may work for some people, but my particular learning style finds this to be a good way to waste 1 - 5 days of my life. If I could rewrite the training it would be around some common, logical use of the program and I would provide a real world problem to be solved. Each lesson would have one problem and each would be self contained. For example, the first lesson for new users might be "creating a 1 page flyer."
Next, I would absolutely ban anyone who had anything to do with the development of the program from taking part in the development of the training for the program. Simply put, they know too much about the program and seem compelled by some dark force to try to compress the full sum of that knowledge into an introductory lesson. If you have ever taken a software class the easiest way to see this is the alternate method lesson – I.e. "you can change fonts by highlighting the text and right clicking to get to the drop down, OR, you can go to the home menu then to the font menu on the toolbar (hmmm, where is that?), OR you can click one of the present font styles on the menu bar (what are THEY?). Too much information! MapQuest has solved this problem - yes, there are multiple ways to get from Richmond to Chicago, but it doesn't try to show ALL of them!
I then found a link to a chapter in a book promising to teach me how to create a simple pamphlet. Cool, I am a sequential learner and a book implies a certain grounding in sequence. I downloaded the chapter, printed it and sat down with my computer to work through it. The first thing it wanted to confirm was that I had downloaded the chapter files before I started. I hadn't so I clicked on the file and downloaded it and then found I couldn't open it. Sigh. So I downloaded it again. Then I couldn't open it again. Great, so obviously it did not have an error on the download. I looked at the file – it was an .SITX file. What the hell was this and how did I open it? Over the next irritating 45 minutes I found it was a Mac formatted archive (easy), and I could download a free extraction program (hard – multiple offers to pay $50 for the full program before I could find one that allowed just an extraction) that would extract the files and put them on my drive. Another hour that should have been spent learning the software was tossed into the bit bucket while I played with irrelevant software solving the wrong problem.
So, to summarize this – and to provide some general info for e-Learning developers from all walks of life - Adobe did a good job of putting their software on-line, but a bad job of providing training for me. The reasons for this were several, but can be summed up under one general heading - my learning style did not match their teaching style.
BTW, after all this, the software does seem quite good.
R
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