Online Training

On Wednesday just gone I delivered a presentation on an online training course that we've developed at the BBC to the RMS London group. There seemed to be a fair amount of interest in it, so I thought I'd post some of the details about it.

Training in the BBC is delivered through classroom sessions, face-to-face or online. Our department (Information and Archives) and the Information Policy and Compliance department (responsible for FOI and DPA compliance among other things) jointly commissioned an online course to assist in promoting FOI messages, particularly with regard to understanding the need to manage records according to our retention schedule.

Overall it's taken nearly two years to reach the point where we're ready with the course. In terms of work effort, it's far less than that, however there have been any number of delays caused by administrative issues and a few by technical problems.

The course was written using Mohive's e-learning publishing system. This is a standard piece of software used by BBC Training.

The script was written by records management staff (mostly me). As it is intended for general BBC staff, we took the approach that it should be largely jargon free, that it should explain basic records management concepts and that the key priority was to get people to start thinking about records management - not teach them how to do it.

When recording the narration for the course, we decided we wanted Radio 4's Charlotte Green for the job. We wanted a presenter with a distinct and interesting voice - and as we have a couple of Radio 4 fans in the department, she was the first choice. Fortunately she was willing to do it. And on a personal note she was nothing but pleasant and professional to work with - not sure my word counts any with job references, but I'd certainly hire her again.

We also wanted a senior manager to introduce the course. In this case, after much internal debate (which led to one of those delays I mentioned), we finally asked Caroline Thomson, the BBC's Chief Operation Officer to do the honours. The idea here was to put some official weight behind the course - something that's quite important when you're trying to get people to treat seriously something they've probably never heard about before.

The course was structured in line with BBC Training's advice with an introduction and summation to each learning section in order to emphasize the key learning points.

We used BBC content throughout the course - both in examples and in some of the accompanying images. The idea there was to make the course more interesting and to add a local theme to it so that it could be relevant to people's jobs.

There are a number of interactive exercises used in part to add variety to the course, but also to reinforce the learning with some actual doing. We used a number of different types of exercise to again add variety.

Where we had screens that contained a lot of flat information, we would try to break it up as much as possible. Sometimes this would involve giving the user control over playing out the information through clickable icons. Other times we relied on keeping the screen busy with images and text appearing, synchronised with the spoken narration.

At the end of the course we included a couple of hypertext links to lead participants to further information about records management services within the BBC.

Written Archives

Quick link to videos of Jacquie Kavanagh talking about the BBC's written archives. Jacquie's a Multimedia Archivist now rather than the Written Archivist that she's credited as being as all the information management disciplines in the BBC are blurring into one.

Or perhaps that should be two as we have media management and media archiving both taking place within the BBC - and the needs of the archive are not the only thing that drives the requirements of actively managing media. Although these have always been very closely linked at the Beeb - more within the records management discipline than other areas, but the joined-up information management-archive management approach has spread as we're moving general archival policies up to the point of creation rather than just worrying about material at the point of capture.

Anyway, that's all beside the point - the videos give a brief look at the richness of the BBC's archive. Sadly this type of detail is more and more likely to be lost as our written conversations become increasingly ephemeral using today's communication technologies. What may be good for business isn't necessarily good for posterity.

And now I'm starting to sound like a Luddite, so I'll stop now.