I'm working my way through an e-learning course through DSA (the Course Developer Workshop), which is giving me the opportunity to analyze how they're delivering e-learning. What I'm finding rather surprised me:

• They use reference-based training: the reference material to be used on the job is delivered in a binder, along with the course elements (objectives, examples, exercises, summaries).
• The course is advanced by a slideshow, which the instructor drives throughout the multi-day course.
• The course was delivered as instructor-led training, which was audio-recorded.
• The 3-day course was divided into 6 lessons with 4 video segments, all hosted on their site (no CDs or downloads).
• The live-course audio was edited down, stripping out all student questions, discussion periods, and dead time for students to complete tasks.
• The trimmed audio was laid on top of the slideshow, as if the instructor were narrating it in real time. (This was probably the trickiest part.)
• The slideshow was enhanced with circles, markup, and highlighting, such as the instructor would do.
• The slideshow added pauses, with "Click to continue" buttons, when exercises were to be completed first.

So, the experience is that the e-learning student follows along very much like a classroom student, glancing between binder and slideshow, completing exercises, and following the instructor's voice. At the end of each lesson, e-learning students complete and email homework to a designated instructor. Instead of 3 days, students have 30 days of server access, during which to finish the course. The video segments must be completed or else homework assignments will be missed. Course completion includes testing some of the output with a volunteer subject; when I get that far, I'll know how well that works, compared to a live class.

This strikes me as incredibly efficient, for certain kinds of training: create the instructor-led class, run it and work out the bugs, and then convert it to e-learning. I might change some things, such as the merging of the reference with the coursebook -- I'd rather keep a 50-pg reference than 250 pages that includes bloat I won't need to use again. Specifically, I'd like the job aids to be broken out into a handy desktop booklet. But, overall, I'm impressed with the effectiveness and efficiency of their approach, and pragmatism, after all, is DSA's signature.