Which pieces do you want to outsource and which pieces do you want to develop in-house? Listed here are a few typical concerns around eLearning content development outsourcing.
To help you arrive at a decision whether to develop in-house or outsource your eLearning content development requirement, you need to be aware of what goes into a typical course development process and what are its various components, so that you can see if you have in-house capability for each component.
As we are aware that in a typical end-to end eLearning solution development process, there is the analysis phase, followed by the design and development phases, followed by the implementation and evaluation phases.
Now the question you need to ask yourself is: What do you want? Which pieces do you want to outsource and which pieces do you want to develop in-house? Do you want to outsource what you can, and free up your resources so that they can focus on your core business? Or perhaps put their effort into other critical areas such as preparing your organization for eLearning? Maybe you would like to outsource just a few components across the various phases. But first, you need to look at a few typical concerns around outsourcing. Listed here are some of them. You can probably relate to some or all of these. Concerns usually are around:
- Lack of Expertise in designing learning solutions. This gets intensified when customers sometimes arrive at conclusions based on inadequate information or because they have bought into popular misconceptions around outsourcing.
- Another concern could be around confidentiality. How secure is the data that customers share with vendor partners? Especially if it is highly confidential information.
- One of the biggest objections from a project management point of view is that “I cannot manage a team next door, so how do I manage a remote vendor?” A common concern related to project management in the outsourcing context is that vendors tend to agree to the required deliverables, but mess it up when it comes to implementation.
- And then there are concerns around communication and cultural differences.
So, you will have to look at how you can take sound decisions after analyzing your requirement from all angles. Of course, your decisions, will be affected by various factors such as your time-to-market, resource availability etc.
