User:DOI University

Federal Collaborative e-learning Laboratory (Fed-CEL)

The goal of this project is to transform the way e-learning content is developed in the federal government by creating the Federal Collaborative E-learning Laboratory. The Fed-CEL will be an online community of instructional designers, graphic designers, Web developers, and subject matter experts that will collaboratively develop federal-wide e-learning courses and content, and share instructional design and e-learning development best practices.

The establishment of the Fed-CEL will reduce course and content development costs across the federal sector through the pooling of resources and the establishment of a clearinghouse for common mandated training. The community will also improve overall ISD and e-learning development knowledge across the federal sector by allowing for knowledge sharing and evaluation and discussion of best practices. This in turn will foster innovation in e-learning development as members experiment and build on each other’s work.

As the dawn of a new era in social and collaborative Web technologies is taking hold in our society, a few trends have emerged. The first is people across the globe are willing to seize the opportunity to connect, create and collaborate using Web technologies and willing to do so in large numbers. This pent up need for community has driven the success of sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The second trend is that great things can be accomplished in a much more cost efficient way by pooling hours across large populations, like the federal employee population. It is better for 250 people to spend 1 hour developing a course versus 1 person spending 250 hours. The concept of pooling knowledge and development resources via social media tools is now a well-established and proven idea. Wikipedia is the best example of this concept as it is estimated that over 100 million man hours have gone into developing that resource at a minimal cost, far more hours than one organization could have hoped to accomplish or fund. A third trend is that collaborative groups foster innovation. From Apple, to Google, to Second Life, to Linux all of these celebrated companies or software platforms have developed innovation through collaboration.

The outcome of this project is to have an established community of e-learning developers and a completed course within 6 months that can be shared and used across all federal agencies to meet a mandated training requirement.

The project will be developed in three stages. Stage one will be the development of the initial framework and rules of the community. Stage two will be a pilot of the community. The pilot team will be hand selected from agencies across the federal government through nominations from the CLO council. Preferably this group will consist of both experts in the ISD field and managers of e-learning offices. This group will be established as the core of the community and will help develop the initial content for the site. Stage three will be the release of the community to federal employees at large.

To accomplish the goal of transforming e-learning development and collaboration in the federal government help is needed. Through executive support and energy we can make a difference.

Vision: Share, Grow, Innovate

Mission: Transform e-learning content development in the federal government through a connected online community of instructional designers, graphic designers, Web developers, and subject matter experts collaboratively developing federal-wide e-learning courses and content, and sharing instructional design and e-learning development best practices.

Justification: Across federal government there are several mandated training requirements that all agencies must comply with. Most of these mandated training requirements are not agency specific but rather broad based concepts. For each agency to produce an hour long course to comply would cost an exponential development burden of (the number of agencies) times (course development costs) all to produce the same result. No matter the cost reduction used to develop a course, using the status quo approach, that number is always multiplied across every agency. This is a substantial burden in both dollar costs and resource costs, a burden that ultimately falls onto the taxpayer.

Business Need: To help reduce the cost of broad training development by reducing the number of courses from one per agency to one per the entire government. Beyond simple resource (money, staff) reduction, the other key business need is to leverage the power of the federal government knowledge base. As each agency is running into shrinking staffing budgets it is imperative to share knowledge. Communities are the size that we choose to define them. Each of us is a community of one, consisting of a certain set of competencies and skill level but also consisting of a limited amount of productive time. As we begin to add individuals to that community, say our office, we add to the pool of competencies (knowledge, experience, skills) and to the amount of production time. Instead of personal limits that each of us posses, the new limit of knowledge, time, and production becomes the limit of our definition of community. By continuing to expand that definition of community from your office, then bureau, then agency, then entire federal government we are able to exponentially expand our knowledge and resource base. And this community is not just set up to increase concrete production, but is a confluence of ideas and collaborators. We are able to tap into experiences, knowledge and best practices.

Objectives:

1.	Produce collaboratively built online mandatory courses. 2.	Establish Fed-CEL as a clearinghouse for mandatory training content. 3.	Develop a community of practice for ISD and design in the Federal government.