Selecting a Multimedia Vendor

By Travis Piper

Excerpted from:
CBT Solutions, November/December 1997.

I wrote my first CBT course in 1974 while at Xerox Corporation. It was the worst course I ever wrote. Why? Because it was my first course. Each course I’ve developed since then has gotten better as I’ve learned new design strategies, new media, and new technologies.

When giving presentations in the early 80s, I loved to use the phrase "your first course will always be your worst course," partly because of the rhyme and partly because it was painfully true. I would then follow that with "Are you willing to wager the entire success of CBT in your organization on someone’s first course?" Then I’d hit them with "No, you need to hire a professional. You want your CBT to make a good first impression. You want to convince senior management to continue developing more CBT because of the money it will save your organization."

That was 23 years ago. Now there are so many professionals in all facets of this industry from creators of digitized audio and video, razzle-dazzle graphics, and animation, to CDs and Websites, that no one should be creating anything but the best possible CBT or multimedia. And yet, shoddy work is still appearing. Can it be that some of the hired professionals are more talk than do? Are we hiring vendors based on a marketing pitch or based on an established track record? The answers are "yes" and "yes." The challenge is how do you find the vendors that can do and that have an established track record?

On the way to answering this question, I’ve shared some personal examples of experiences I’ve had or that have been related to me concerning hiring a vendor. Finally, I have created a vendor selection checklist to help you make your selection from the myriad of vendors that exist today.

The goal is to help you to team up with a vendor that can help you to produce an effective and affordable quality product, not one that is just skin deep.

IT’S STILL THE DESIGN, STUPID!

In 1975 I was on a special team at Xerox charged with investigating possible CBT systems for nation-wide implementation of training for Xerox administrative personnel. One of the first systems we looked at was a mainframe-based system called Plato from Control Data Corporation. We saw it running at Purdue University where a college student "whiz kid" was putting the product through its paces. The monitor was called a plasma display. It was bright orange on black. Quite striking compared to good ol’ green on black. And it was fast. I remember a clock at the upper right corner of the display that had a sweeping second hand on it. That was the first animated graphic I ever saw on a computer. The course was Chemistry, and the student could manipulate various vials of chemicals on the screen and conduct potentially dangerous experiments with only the risk of invoking a graphical "boom" on the screen if the mixture got too explosive.

The next demonstration of Plato that we saw was for airline pilot training. It was very much like what we all think of today as an early version of Flight Simulator. The pilot’s instruments were at the bottom of the screen and the horizon, airstrip, and other air traffic were at the top portion of the screen. We were all really impressed with Plato and with the engaging instructional design strategies which had been employed in the courses we’d seen.

A couple of years later I was speaking with someone who was telling me about their experience with Plato courses. "They’re just automatic page turners. It’s so boring. Just text, text, text." How quick we are to pigeon-hole something new in terms of our first impression. Of course Plato wasn’t the problem. It was the design of the training (or the lack of design). I’ve seen the same thing in mainframe Phoenix, and in a variety of Windows- and Macintosh-based programs — it’s like the difference in a mediocre B movie and a box office hit. One you’d just as soon forget and the other is engaging, visually appealing, entertaining, and you will remember it for a long time.

So what’s the problem now? Everyone’s a professional! And from what I’ve seen, some of these "professionals" are barely past their first course. Consequently, they are being hired (not because of their track record, but because of their marketing skills) and they are producing multimedia which, from a training standpoint, is weak at best.

When you go in search of a vendor for your next project, be sure to look hard for these characteristics:

• A proven track record
  


• A team with the right skills mix consisting of creativity, instructional design, graphics design, media production, programming, and quality assurance.