Understanding and Adapting To Organizational Dynamics When Leading e-Learning Development with Danny Ortegon

Oriented toward: Project Leaders, Project Mgrs, Sr. Leaders, Team Leaders

The e-Learning landscape has changed greatly over the last several years.

There has been a tremendous increase in the amount of money, resources and efforts expended to develop e-Learning solutions across multiple sectors - corporate training, K-12 and higher education, not-for-profits, etc.

A large amount of money has been spent to get training and learning “online”.  Some have been very successful, while many others have had much poorer results.

Plus, the impact of COVID-19 pandemic! Things are changing and evolving at an unbelievable rate!

The typical challenges (tools, platforms, integrations, delivery, learning goals, etc.) are the obvious factors when developing e-Learning projects.

Admittedly, many e-Learning tools and products are cool, but this doesn’t really translate into your customer feeling that you understand them, and their learning challenge.

Session Objectives: For this conversation Danny will focus on a few items-

  • No. 1 - Understanding your customer’s structure (people, processes, best practices) and assessing the Learning Challenge.
  • No. 2 - Assessing and understanding the unique challenges of your customer’s organization and culture as they move towards a new learning solution (using Model A, B, C)
  • No. 3 - Understanding the impact of change on your customer (people and organizations)

Luis Malbas  
Hello, everybody, welcome to the training, learning and development community Tuesday to you all out there. Let's see we've got a live audience going. We've got Trish is here and Carlita. Peacock is here. Cindy Nagel, nice to see you Yang, Michelle Shea. And let's see, I saw Rebecca down there. Lisa just jumped in. Thanks for thanks for joining today. I've got a great tale diecast for you, with Danny, Oregon, who Danny has spoken here on this broadcast in the past. And we're going to talk a little bit about his background and get started. But the topic is understanding and adapting to organizational dynamics when leading elearning development, which is I mean, long title. And this is stuff that I think is really, really important. When Danny sent over sort of a summary of what he was going to discuss today. I'm like, Okay, this isn't something that we typically get into the these are things that like only an established vet would be able to share this type of advice. And so I'm really, really grateful to Danny for coming in and, and sharing his knowledge. And so we're gonna start out, Danny, I want you to just talk about like, what you What's your background? Exactly?

Danny Ortegon  
Sure, sure. Yeah, Luis. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me on. I know what we're like 3025 minutes out of 30 minutes.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, something like that.

Danny Ortegon  
I want to be cognizant of the time. So my background is in education and technology years and years ago, I started out in the technology realm, working as a field engineer. And long story short, I got involved working with an r&d group. And one of the things we found out was, you had your hardware, people on one side of the room, you had your software people on the other side of the room, and we would develop a hardware because I was on the hardware side, and we'd throw the letter to literally we'd figured till we throw the device to the other side of the wall, hey, let's get the software guys figured out. It was mostly guys back then, too. And what I said to my boss was, well, they're really struggling to understand how this device works. Somebody should train them on that. And this is before the idea of what he what was corporate training even a thing. And I had a great boss, and he said, You know what, why don't you? Why don't you train them figure out how to do that. So I ended up building instructor guides, participant guides, materials, also before I even knew what they were called. And so that kind of piqued my interest that there's this whole part of how we do our work, where we need to do a better job of communicating what's important and why it's important. And so I kind of transitioned out of kind of a strict technology world into the education side, got a master's degree work for financial services firm work for us. And the manufacturing world worked in consulting world worked with a specialty pharmacy group, which is a very unique place. And the whole focus was on how can I help and partner with my customers, my clients, whatever, whatever you want to call them, so they could figure out how to train and educate their constituents better?

Luis Malbas  
No, that's great. And so, so what you're going to be talking about today, what qualifies you exactly to be able to offer this advice?

Danny Ortegon  
Well, I would say, you know, a few things qualify, I mean, the school of hard knocks, you know, to be a consultant and to talk about elearning, which I did you know, 20 plus years ago, before, it was really something I really had to understand what the challenges were how to communicate what those challenges were, and make build relationships with the people who could make or break it. And that was something that I learned as being an engineer where you had what was called a design review. And your idea had to be posted up in front of some very smart people who would just poke holes in everything that you said, you had that develop a thick skin and develop a way to communicate what's important and why it's important in a very short period of time. So when the learning stuff started to really happen, I wasn't afraid to jump in there and say, well, there's this thing called the internet. And there's this is with early browsers, I need to learn what that's about. Because from what I'm reading what people are telling me outside of my organization, this is the future. And so I was able to be successful. And in a very kind of old fashion and financial services companies say, Look, you're you're developing all this software, and you're sending it out to your clients, and you don't want to train them. But you want to give them some sort of materials, why don't we build some online help functions that they're building the tasks specific, that will follow what your, what your clients are using, and give them help when they need to, so that they don't feel left out on on their own, you know, and so, if I can come up with a strategy to make that happen, everyone will be much happier than if you have to send you know hundreds peoples out people out to the field. So that was like kind of the first time where I kind of started to get an understanding of there's this melding of education. technology. And to me, the big part is how do I help my leaders, my constituents, get their people trained to know what they need to know.

Luis Malbas  
And it just, it doesn't. Normally, we don't normally have conversations about elearning projects, where we're talking about the importance of human relationships when, what when you're leaving or managing an actual elearning project. So I thought that was really interesting when you sent that over just talking about the, the human element and being able to establish that. So what I'm going to do now I'm going to go ahead and just sort of minimize my video, and I'm going to get you, you know, like, I'm gonna have you just sort of lead us into this conversation.

Danny Ortegon  
Okay, thank you, Louise. And anytime you need to jump in, or anybody has a question, or I'm not communicating, just please do because I, I would like this to be a conversation, where I'm sharing kind of the lessons that I've learned. And hopefully, it will help folks to connect some ideas about how to think about the relationships with their clients. So I know it's a mouthful of a title. But the whole idea here is kind of set the background is that the elearning world has changed tremendously over the last over years. There's tons of money and resources that are being spent, a lot of expectations are really high. And I think often when we deal with our leaders, we deal with the decision makers, they don't always understand what the tools are, what the methodologies are, what all the stuff, the stuff that we like, and we think is cool. What does it mean, for them, they want to know, I have some sales people, I have some manufacturing people, I have marketing people, I have people in the health care world, I need them to get to work from where they are now to where they need to be, and to learn and function in a much, much better way than they have right now. So their questions are always back to me as Danny, what can you do to help me and I had to really think about how do I communicate this cool stuff that we're doing in the E learning world or the technology world, and to the language that makes sense to them. And so I had to develop that based on feedback I got from my managers feedback I got from the leaders, and by building relationships with people that have those kind of what I would call Crucial Conversations. So that's kind of how I kind of got to where I was, it's kind of ironic, I would say that I have a strong technology background, but I see that the leverage point for me is developing partnerships and relationships with people one on one, or one to many, by having communications that what you want to call soft skills, if you want to call it that. So it's more than just the technology, it's more than just the methodology. It's building a relationship where you can bring these tools and these in these techniques and, and you have a partnership with folks that are that hold the purse strings or can make that go or no go decision that you want to kind of connect with and help them get to the next point. So I'm just want to jump in because I know that we're really rambling here. But basically, there's three points that I wanted to share. And and this is based on my experiences as an independent consultant as an internal person working on the team, working across financial services, manufacturing, and a consulting role, and specialty pharmacy, that kind of helped me connect and work with my partners or my clients, whatever you may want to call them to develop a better a better chance of making an E learning solution work. So the first of these is objectives is kind of understanding your customer structure, their people, their processes, their best practices. And the idea here is that

if you're an E learning leader, if you have a team or if you're an independent, you have what I call KCS. Or it's probably known as cases, you have knowledge, you have skills, and you experience experiences. And these are all couched in the terms of an elearning developer. And you're going to be very conversant on that your team is going to be very conversant on that odds are your customer your clients aren't. So to me, one of the key things you want to do is develop a way to communicate to your to your customer, your client, what skills, what knowledge, what experiences you and your team can bring to bear to help them solve and understand what the learning solution learning challenges are to develop a learning solution and that you're communicating to them in language that they understand. And that to me, that's a first part of understanding who they are by communicating in a way in the language that they're familiar with. And then you're starting to build that relationship where you are truly partnering as you're moving from what learning solution that I have in place. Now, where do I want it to be? What do I want to improve? Or do I even want to do it this way, is to have these conversations and to build these relationships is important to look beyond the tools beyond the methodology which we all know is really cool and we really love But oftentimes I don't think our is our leaders really understand what it means all the time. And it's our jobs, I think, as learning professionals, to partner with them, and help them understand. So we don't become order takers, because that's a lot of the feedback I heard, I've heard over the years is that oftentimes, the learning folks are either part of HR or not part of the frontline folks. And they're viewed as order takers here, here's this order, build me some learning, don't spend a lot of money, and let me know when it's successful. And then off they go. And, unfortunately, that's part of probably everybody's experience. And it's very difficult to overcome. But I think there are ways to overcome that. And build a build relationships and develop some skills to connect with your partner with your leaders to become partners, and help them focus on the ideas that you bring to the table and how you're going to help them solve their learning challenges in a way that makes sense to them.

Luis Malbas  
And so again, he let me ask you this. So understanding this this, this first point, understanding the structure, how important is that in it? As far as the overall process is concerned? Is this something you should put a ton of reallocate a lot of resources towards that? Or how much time should you be spending to, to getting that understanding?

Danny Ortegon  
I think it varies, I mean, I can tell you that my experiences, my last two experiences were with a K through 12, education company from before that a higher ed company. And I had to spend a lot of time getting to know the K through 12 company, because they already had a methodology that was paper based, and these huge binders, and they were working in hundreds of schools across the country, and their methodology was solid. In fact, they're in the top 10 school districts in the country. I mean, that's not an easy thing to do. But I had really no idea why that methodology was important to them. And by having conversations about them with them to learn who they are and what they perceive their goals to be, I could recognize that what they're proposing. And they may not say it this way, they're proposing a blended learning solution that's facilitated by a teacher and a student that uses technology that we didn't even know what it would look like yet. And that would parallel what a student and teacher would see in a binder. So that's, there's a lot going on there. And my job was to help them articulate that and to conceive what that might look like, and then partner with them to find a technology vendor to make it a reality. And so I had to spend a lot of time sort of partner partnering with them and educating them and actually making them feel comfortable, even though they had a mandate from schools and from states that you need to build a technology or digital version of what you have. They really didn't know what that meant. That is no it had to happen. And they didn't want to get overwhelmed. You know, they one of the things they said to me, we don't want technology for technology's sake. And on the other side of that, I literally vetted out hundreds of vendors. And these are vendors from around the world. And often what I heard was, yeah, yeah, I get what you're trying to do, I'm gonna put this template over what they're saying, and that students are gonna do everything, you're gonna love it. I mean, I'm exaggerating. But, but I knew because I had that relationship with my clients to understand what's important to them, and what kind of learning that they're trying to apply that that was never gonna fly. And I wouldn't let those folks get anywhere near my iCloud client. Because these were two founders who are highly educated, highly successful, former teachers who now had a education company that was going to become a digital education company. Right. And so they still had the analog components of that, which were very, very well received. And now they want to have the digital components of that, and they don't want to ruin what's already there. They wanted to parallel that. So I spent a lot of time doing flip chart work, you know, whiteboard work, having conversations, whatever with the founders, with the leaders, with the folks that were in the field, even with some of their competitors, even with folks who are exemplary in the field, because I really needed to get an understanding of what's important to them, and why cuz I realized, I couldn't just say, Hey, I'll bring in vendor x, and they'll give you everything you need. Just put down, you know, $700,000, and off, they'll go. And that was never a fly. Right? So and then the higher ed side, it was really like it was a learning. It was an LMS implementation. And what they needed for me was they needed somebody to be the strategic eyes to say is, every are everyone, all the groups aligned to get to where they need to be? So I needed to bring my experience and my knowledge, what that means to work with learning management systems, and what to watch out for. And I had to build, which were difficult conversations. I had to build relationships with people across the board, even though I reported to the president of the university and I didn't want them to perceive me as looking over their shoulder which is essentially what I was doing, but I had to connect With them in such a way to say, Look, my job is to help everybody move forward and to bring my experiences to bear. And I'm not going to step in areas that I shouldn't be at, I just want to get the temperature of what's happening. So that's a long way to say the two different ways. Why it does

Luis Malbas  
sound like understanding that structure is a critical component of all this.

Danny Ortegon  
I think so. And I know that everyone doesn't have that luxury. I mean, I think often it really depends on a particular instructional designer, elearning persons organization and how they're structured, you may or may not have these opportunities. But when you do, I think if you have this methodology of thinking about the people, the processes, and the best practices, and connecting with them, it's going to help you propel that relationship forward.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah. And Lisa has a great point in chat, she says the best place I ever sat in an organization was when I reported to finance instead of HR, it's an entirely different focus. And absolutely. So understanding the structure is I mean, you can see right there, that's, that's totally critical.

Danny Ortegon  
Yeah, I mean, I had, I had the, I was fortunate when I worked with these founders that it was there were small enough, there were less than 20 people, even though they're spread out across the country, that they let me in to the room, you know, I mean, they let me see behind the curtain. But I had to build that trust, and I had to build that relationship, not everyone's going to have that opportunity. But I do think if you have this kind of framework of trying to understand who they are and understand what you can bring it, it's a better chance for you to partner and move away from just being an order taker.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, and I j ROC is saying that is a key skill, how does one get better at walking into a situation and mapping the power lines, you know, who can say yes or no to a project? And, and I totally Yeah, that's, that's, that is a key skill, being able to do that,

Danny Ortegon  
yeah, you can almost say that's an analog skill versus a digital skill. That's something that's a little bumpier, that takes time, and there's gonna be some successes and some failures, I can say, also, I'm a little bit older, I've had a lot of work and experience in a lot of different arenas. And I've learned kind of the hard way, because I came in with a very strong technology background, I learned how to learn to build relationships with people, to meet people for coffee, to go to after work events, to sit in on meetings that I wasn't part of, so that I can try to understand the bigger picture of what's happening. So that's a that's something that I think you develop over time unless you have a culture of an organization that invites you in from the beginning, which I had with my education client and the K through 12. space. So jumping forward, because I want to I want to be cognizant of time, I want to jump to the second objective. And before I get there, I just want to share this idea is that I've learned in the work I've done in graduate schools that organizations are made of humans made up of humans, and we're complex, and we have our own skills and challenges. And I think, again, that's another one of the ideas that I think helps me understand that even though people are a very skilled, very powerful, and have a lot of ideas and expectations, they're still humans, and you have to meet them where they're at, and see what you can bring to the table. So that kind of dovetails I think nicely with the next two objectives. And the second one that I want to talk about is understanding the unique challenges of your customers organization and your culture. And this is based on the work that I did in graduate school with a professor named Gerard Egan at Loyola University, Chicago, and he used this, this model is of calling Model A, B, and C, the idea of the model that you worked with is, it's a way to provide a framework to understand your organization that you're working with, so you understand how they're organized. Where, and, and a little bit about their culture and little bit about the dynamics of how they work. And why that's important is because anytime you're working in an elearning implementation, you're moving people from where they are now to some other place. So by definition, you're dealing with change, and change is hard. And most people don't like change. You know, even the people that are supposed to be change management consultants, it's hard. But this model helps provide a framework to say, Model A is where's your customer. Now, what learning solution do they have in place? How do they work every day? How do they function? What are the key components of the learning that they provide for their users? How are they organized, what are some of the key challenges that they have? And to get an idea of where what that is, and so they've brought me in or they bring people in to say, Okay, I want to build a new learning solution. I want to adapt an existing learning solution. And I want to move from where I am now, which is Model A to Model B that's kind of like it can't really see in the screen but you're moving from down here to where they are now to up here to a new ideal of what the learning solution might look like. So you're helping people to think about. If I have a learning solution now that works strictly on let's say laptops, and I need to go into a learning solution, that's going to be multiple devices, multiple browser, multiple browser capability. And people could use it on their phones, they can use it on their iPads, they could use it on any device that gets online. And it's going to be a browser based solution. That's a big ask. So that's the ideal. And there's nothing wrong with talking about that. But you have to articulate and have that conversation with those folks to say, if you're down here in your existing learning solution, single device, and you want to go up here, a lot of changes are going to happen. And you have to kind of document that. And think about that, again, have those conversations say, here, you are now Model A, Model B, here's where you want to be, what do we need to do to get you there? What are the key components and you're having conversations with the leadership with the frontline folks, with the users, you're having conversations with your peers, that kind of level set for yourself, you can even have conversation with exemplars out there who are actually doing what your client wants to do, that you can take away what's important. And then you could share with them, again, to build a comfort level. So and egans model, it's three phases, Model A, where are they now Model B, where do they want to be? And below that, you can save model C, and model c could be described as the shadow side or what's getting in the way, we all know that we want to build a new learning solution. And we're here we need to go here to the new learning solution. And historically, we found that it's really hard. It's difficult to build a new learning solution without making mistakes, right? Without having things fail, without people getting frustrated or lost. And what that model for dragon says is, that's natural. And that's normal, that he calls this the shadow side the things that are below the model a Model B, how people think about work, how people do their work, and the things that are positive, and the things that negative, they're not always listed in the job titles, they're not listed in the org chart. These are the things as the consultant or as an even an internal consultant, you have to kind of peel back the layers carefully to understand how do people support the learning solution. Now, how do they want to do that? What do you think's going to get in the way? Are you going to have to have more digital skills are you going to have to have more developers on the table on the team are you going to have to provide a learning solution for hundreds or 1000s more users. And if you are what might that mean as you speculate, and, and predict how that learning solution is going to be put into place. So it this framework of Model A, B and C helps you kind of understand that your client, your partners, they're on, they're on a trajectory that's taking them from where they are now to where they want to be. It's, it's an upward trajectory, there's a lot of challenges and pitfalls. And there's a lot of things below it that can get in the way, and that's normal. But if we're able to, again, build on the idea of having a relationship and partner with folks, we can help ourselves understand what that is help our teams understand. And we if we have this confidential collaborative relationship with our customers, with our clients, we can talk to them about, here's what I see happening. For your team. If they're resisting the change, if they're resisting, going from the learning solution to the new learning solution, and you're not tattling on them, you're not telling up telling on them, you're just sharing, these are some of the challenges that you have. And you're hoping to be,

you want to do that at the beginning of the project. And throughout the project. You don't want to wait to the end when you say, okay, we come up with a new, a new learning solution, that's all going to be great, everyone's happy everyone's on board. Because it's just not, it's just not going to work like that. So to have those conversations and kind of dig around carefully and confidentially into what might be getting in the way helps you surface some of the things that that impact how people do their jobs. And one just quick example of like a shadow side activity, or settle shadow side example is years and years ago, I was working as an r&d world. And one of the things I had to do as an engineer was go to the manufacturing floor, because that's where the AR devices were built. And one of the things that I was fortunate some colleagues said, well, Daniel, before you go on the manufacturing floor, I want you to be aware, there's a lot of people there, a lot of activity and you're gonna notice there's yellow lines painted on the floor. And those yellow lines mark out territory. And your job is to stay out of that territory, walk this neat, narrow pathway to get where you need to be and don't cross those lines. Because if you do, someone's gonna get mad and they're gonna yell at you because you don't belong there. And that was a strange thing to me because all they were were painted lines on the ground or basically on the on the floor of the manufacturing manufacturing facility. But that's how that facility work. That's their shadow side. That wasn't written down anywhere. Nobody said that in the management, whenever you go to the manufacturer for Be sure you don't go across those lines, one of my colleagues told me that, and that helped me understand that now I'm in somebody else's turf. And there are other rules that apply. And I need to connect with these people. And I need to be respectful of their what their rules are and how they do things. And that's just kind of a little tiny example of a shadow side activity, maybe. And I would just add that shadow side activities are, are can be positive, and they can be negative, they're not one or the other. So sometimes, you know, from a positive perspective, people get things done. Because they know even though the org chart says I need to talk to Joe over here, I can go talk to somebody else who knows how to do this work, and they're going to help me understand what's important, I don't always have to go to Joe, because that's just how things are done. And not, you're not subverting that person, you're just gaining some insights of how to get things done. And so long story short, the idea there is to understand that organizations are complex, you might start out here, you're going to be going up and with a more sophisticated solution. And there's a lot of things that can impact how folks move through that. So then the last kind of bullet I want to just kind of jump forward to is the idea of managing change. And when you're talking about building a solution, building a new, a new learning solution, you're dealing with change, and change is hard for everybody. And I just want to share a quote that I have from the Gardner group that I think really helps us understand that when we're dealing with helping our partners and clients and to get through where they want to be to get this new learning solution, they're going through a change. And that's not always easy, and it's difficult. And so the quote that I love, it says that while there are many reasons why people will resist change, most of the reasons have something to do with a feeling of loss. Some people feel a strong loss of security or productive predictability. Others feel a loss of control or power over their resources. I think that's really powerful. Because part of that research also said that a third of the time, change initiatives, change initiatives are only successful about a third of the time, that's most of the time change initiatives fail. And that's across the board, not just the learning of any kind of change that happens. I think that kind of gives us a perspective that dealing with change and understanding that people are going through changes is an important thing. And that our job again, is to partner and help them and to be empathetic and understanding what they're going through. I don't know how we're doing with time, Louise?

Luis Malbas  
I think we're good. I mean, um, yeah, we I do want to see if anybody has any questions, feel free to post them in chat or add them to the Ask a Questions section of the of the interface. I do want to ask you, Danny, how much of this work? Do you do like, say, as an independent as a freelancer or contractor before you sign on to a project? How much of this work do you actually do?

Danny Ortegon  
I think you have to have an initial conversation and maybe a series of conversations to kind of peel back the layers of what what it is that your your customer your client wants to accomplish, whether it's internal or not, because I think you want to set realistic expectations of what can be accomplished. So I think, you know, as an independent, I would much rather turn work away. If I have that conversation with them and realize that what they're asking for is way too much for either me to handle or Matt might not even be realistic for anybody to handle, I think we all have been inundated with, with commercials with digital. These beautiful things that you see from Apple or from Google, that make it look like these people can open their computer or open their phone and create all this great content that just flies out of out of the screen like a bird and just lands on everybody's, you know, devices and everything's great, what they don't realize it costs millions of dollars to make those commercials and they don't always reflect the reality of what's happening. So I think the spend as much time to get to know what the expectations are and what their goals are early on is going to help, I think set me up for a better chance for success than for me just taking on whatever project comes my way and saying I'll make it work because I just think digital technologies, methodologies for getting stuff done. There's just a lot going on. There's a lot of time and money and resources put put on there, and the expectations are high. So I think it's important to have those conversations early and figure out how realistic things are.

Luis Malbas  
So you learn this stuff like you know, seasoned veteran, you know, in this space, you had to have failed at some of these items. Oh, definitely. Well is there. Can you give us an incidence of like, even just with the first one, understanding customers structure is there? Like, is there a lesson learned in there where you can that you can share with us? Where you, you know, I don't know if you dove into something without understanding that structure? And you're like, Oh, you know,

Danny Ortegon  
yeah, yeah, I think I could go back to when I worked with a Clinical Pharmacy group and I was actually internal. And one of the things that they wanted to do was they wanted to train their pharmacists and their nurses on what sound clinical perceived processes and procedures were. And I thought, well, I can just do some research, I can write all this up, I can put it in a nice, neat package and have somebody work with me. And I'll just toss it out there, and they'll love it. And what I didn't realize was the level of education and they'll specialty sector of specialty pharmacists, these are people who are doing infusions. They're doing, they're working with super powerful drugs. They're working with clients in their homes or in hospitals. And they have a set of rules and regulations and how they function that are industry specific, and vetted out by professional organizations, and vary depending on the organization. I couldn't just pick up hey, here's a, here's a customer service class that I found online that I'm going to put it in PowerPoint for you, I really had to realize, I had realized that long the difficult way that what I was proposing just wasn't gonna fly. And what I learned also for dealing with pharmacists and nurses or deal with life and death situations, they would just tell me, this is never gonna work. I don't know why you're going Bart, but I know why you're calling up this bath. And that was a hard lesson. Because when I was used to being either the expert on the engineering side are the expert on the education side. And if I put something together in the financial services group that I worked with, which was a big group, you just kind of like stepping along doing what you need to do. When you're working. When I was working with a smaller, more sophisticated, more powerful in terms of education level, there's a level expectations I didn't really understand. And that was my fault for not for maybe being too timid to dig in and say, let's talk about what you know, what are the regulatory bodies or regulatory agencies that you feel like you need to meet? Because if you meet these pharmacists, and you meet these nurses, excuse me, you realize they're, they're very, very well educated, not only in their undergrad, graduate PhD level, but they have to be certified all the time. They have to maintain their continuing education credits, and they have to work in highly stressful environments. They don't have time to mess around, and they need to make sure that what they're spending their time on is has been vetted out, reflects best practices, and withstand scrutiny from the outside world. That is a good example. Yeah, no,

Luis Malbas  
that makes sense. That totally makes sense. And that's not something that you know, I mean, you can it's feels like you can only learn that from experience. So yeah, that is that that's a great point. Jay rock has has a question here for you, Oregon, organizationally speaking, what is the shelf life of an elearning? Are they meant to last? Are they better when they are just for a time and meant to be inactivated later? That's a great question. I haven't I don't, I've never considered that.

Danny Ortegon  
I would say it's hard to say I would say it really depends on the organization and the content that you're using. And my K through 12 client, they had a methodology that they spent years and years developing. And that core part of their methodology and how we put together a blended learning, that was never going to change. But if they put things that were addendums, to that technology that allowed them to upload documents, to create and modify documents, to annotate things and to share things between teachers and students, those things were additional. But if I were thinking about my corporate clients, let's say in the financial services world, and they're providing financial services, software to their clients, that stuff has a very short shelf life, because the finance world changes all the time, even though it's regulated, what products they sell, what services they they support, they're going to change. So one to two years would be a long time. Yeah, right.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah. Kim saying I have a project right now where the course will be relevant for about six months, and another one that will probably be used for five years or more. Yeah. And that's interesting, you know, just going into like starting a project, is that something that you actually like, define or consider? It's like, Okay, so we're building this, this is only going to be good for a year. So, you know, we're only going to allocate X amount of resources to it, because this is, you know, since it's a finance thing, and it's about this particular topic, you know, I don't know is that something that that folks consider, and I love the fact that we have So many elearning devs in the in the chat right now, too. So,

Danny Ortegon  
yeah, I think it, it varies, you know, really depends on the organization. And it also depends on the need. I mean, as I said at the beginning, if your leadership sees, you know, this is like the whole idea of needs assessment, they see that they're, their employees or their staff are here, and they need to get to this point, sometimes you're happy, just you help them push to get to that point. And then they forgotten, they move on to the next problem, because we all know, a lot of organizations, you know, people are dealing with a lot of distractions and a lot of challenges every day. And if you can help them move forward with that, and if it's a small project, and it makes a difference, that's gonna, you know, they're gonna be, they're gonna do it, and they're going to move on, and they're going to be appreciative, but they're gonna forget it within a few months and move on to what have you done for me lately?

Luis Malbas  
Nice. Okay, a couple more questions. Jay rocks asking, How long should a freelancer keep the source files after delivering the SCORM? zip? That's a good question. I think it depends, you know? Really, I would have, yeah.

Danny Ortegon  
How big of a how big of a project? Is it? How much storage you have? What long as your contract? Can you offload it to them?

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, Lisa, saying she, she keeps hers for for five years? That's it? Yeah. On a jump drive. That's great. Rakesh is asking what do organizations generally seek as methodology? That is constructivism or problem solving?

Danny Ortegon  
I can only generalize from my experience, I think, for organizations I work it is problem solving. Right? How do I get my content online? Or how do I improve the content that I have online? So that's multiple device, multiple browser, it's really a problem solving or going back to my pharmaceutical, you know, group, it was, I need to get once I figured out the lay land, how do I get my pharmacist continuing education credit? Can you help me figure that out? Fortunately, I had a clinical director who was demanding, but cool. And I had at my fingertips, a programmer right around the corner, who was willing to work with me, and then we created this continuing education, curriculum out of scratch. But, you know, that's just that situation. You know, I think every everybody's gonna have a different experience.

Luis Malbas  
Wow, this has been this has been excellent stuff today. Danny, thank you so much for sharing. Yeah, I love the topic. And I actually would love to talk more about this with people that work in house like, you know, like Kim, and J, ROC. And and, and peacock that are out there. Cindy, maybe we could we could follow up with another conversation that talks less about the talks, rather than just elearning developer stuff, like specific, you know, working within an interface, but just the soft skills, because this is, this is really, really important. And so I appreciate you bringing this out here, Danny, thank you. Thank you, Louise. Is it okay, if I post your LinkedIn?

Danny Ortegon  
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. That'd be happy to. And I would just add that, you know, a lot of what I've learned is from the school of hard knocks, nobody said to me, hey, Danny, when you become a consultant, you should know these things. It became kind of a reflection on my education, my reflection of my experience, and taking the time to think about what what would work for me if I did it a little bit differently. How can I avoid being this order taker person?

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, no, this is decade's worth of experience, like, earned these great airs or not. And I appreciate you sharing that he thanks so much for spending the time with us today. And everybody. I want to remind you Thursday, we've got summer community day happening. Join us career development when we talking it's looking great so far, the the speaker lineup is fantastic. And I think Thursday is going to be really, really fun day. So join us for that. And if you want I'm doing a just a quick broadcast. Tomorrow morning, we'll be talking about how to use aremy. And just the the day in general. So I'll be here tomorrow as well. And with that, I'm going to wrap it up. Thanks again, Danny. Thanks, everybody for joining us, and your time. All right. Take care. Bye bye.

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