Friday, March 11, 2011

E-Learning Globalization

For the past few years, we've traveled the globe to help organizations get set up with online learning.  Not surprisingly, in each location we discover a wide variety of differences in the way people do business, in the way they live, and in their customs and cultures.

Creating e-learning for a global audience can be very intimidating and time consuming. But if done properly, it can be very rewarding.

For example, we just returned from Hong Kong where we were teaching a couple of clients how to localize virtual classroom content on Adobe Connect. Although many people speak and understand English very well, their culture is to show sub-titles on all of the videos. So we compressed videos with the sub-titles and loaded them in. They also needed to localize some of the examples in the content so that they were much more relevant to their audience. So we taught them how to do this and modify it for their needs. In the end, we had trained them on the right ways to create great e-learning for THEIR audience.

One important point! One of the biggest things people forget before they go global with e-learning is to have good systems and processes. If you don't have these in place in advance, you'll get bombarded with one-off tasks that will devour your days.

Here is a great article that just appeared in E-Learning Magazine on some great techniques around building e-learning content for a global audience.

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