On a balmy evening in April, the great and the good of e-learning gathered high above the rooftops of London to break bread – and maybe a few e-learning conventions – at the first Kineo dinner.

Guests from Reuters, Virgin Media, Marks & Spencer, Ufi/learndirect, BP and RBS sat down with us at the Babylon restaurant above the Kensington Rooftop gardens and peruse. The sun stayed out well into the evening, as did we.

On the menu rapide (thanks, we’re very proud of that too) were three loose discussion points:

· For starters: rapid e-learning – definitions and potential
· A substantial main course: rapid e-learning in your business – experiences and challenges
· As a sweetener: the future and new directions for rapid e-learning

To offer a transcript would be a podcast too far, but we’re pleased to share some choice discussion points so you can dine along at home.

Rapid e-learning: definitions and potential

Steve Rayson started proceedings by reading an excerpt from an article in this month’s E-learning Age, which basically consigned Rapid e-learning to the ‘glorified PowerPoint’ compartment. We at Kineo think that shows a basic misunderstanding of the potential of Rapid e-learning  - and the collected guests agreed. We showed a few examples of Rapid e-learning work we’ve done for clients including Ufi/learndirect and Marks & Spencer which threw that PowerPoint comment unceremoniously out the window. Kineo’s drafting a more comprehensive response to that article – more to follow on that later.

Some feedback from the group on definitions and potential:

· Rapid e-learning means that we can now say ‘yes’ a lot more to the business, when they approach us with aggressive timelines and turnaround times
· Rapid e-learning is definitely much more than PowerPoint – it requires proper learning design, and that’s a step that you cannot skip if you hope to do it right
· Rapid e-learning offers learning and development teams greater capacity to support the business, at much lower cost
· Rapid e-learning does not mean lower quality. When done properly, many business teams wouldn’t notice the difference between ‘rapid’ and traditional bespoke
· We discussed the relative merits of Breeze, Articulate, Captivate and server-based tools – there’s no one perfect tool, but for some organisations increasing in scale, a shift to a collaborative tool is looking attractive.

Challenges and experiences

Moving on to what’s happening on the ground in the assembled e-learning organisations, we heard the following key points:

· Bespoke is not the default answer to e-learning any more
· “We haven’t used a ‘traditional bespoke’ e-learning company in over a year, and never will do again”
· “If we could only find a way to work around our preferred supplier list, we’d be able to move a lot faster”
· Rapid e-learning makes it possible to address aggressive business deadlines. Granted there may be some compromises, but a ‘more perfect’ solution one week later would be absolutely pointless as it doesn’t deliver on the key objective: meeting business deadlines
· There was much discussion about the skills that accompany effective rapid e-learning – a strong view that if you’re going to engage in rapid e-learning, you need a tool, but you also need to look at rapid ways of scoping, engaging with subject matter experts and scripting; accelerating in these phases makes all the difference
· We need to relax definitions: rapid e-learning includes a lot of what we’ve traditionally called communications – in fact a lot of comms teams are commissioning rapid e-learning objects without knowing (or caring)
· Platforms are still a pain – one guest’s organisation has 86 different desktop configurations in just one part of the business, so delivery of simple solutions is preferable to dense courseware that just won’t work on most kits.

Future directions

Finally we looked into the future (amazing what powers come to you after several bottles of wine) and discussed the direction rapid e-learning can (and should) be heading. Some excerpts from the group’s predictions/wishlist:

· Better use of RSS feeds to ensure e-learning is dynamic and remains relevant
· More integration of wikis and blogs into rapid e-learning: moving away from the notion of rapid e-learning as courses
· Better use of mobile technologies, including phones, mp3 players, and PDAs as delivery tools for rapid content, and new design approaches to make that possible and engaging
· Increased exploration of what Moodle can do – growing in stature as an LMS, and a great tool for tactical delivery of e-learning options.

Most important point of the evening: A huge thank you from Kineo to our clients who’ve partnered with us for rapid e-learning advice, design and development over the past several months. We raise our glasses to you and look forward to working with you on these and other future directions.