Confessions of a Netflix E-Learning Developer

What did I learn about E-learning development when I worked at Netflix six months ago? Before I share some thoughts, let’s look at the numbers.  Just this year, Netflix sales have topped 910 million dollars with 414 full-time employees at the helm. Seem improbable? Welcome to the 21st century and the consumer side of information management as a service—as these numbers suggest, it can be extremely profitable. Sure, Netflix also pays workers who ship DVDs and answer customer service lines, but the main focus of the 414 full-time employees is ultimately to tame the customer-facing website that enables the latest movie titles to land in your mailbox or play on your computer.  

Is it possible to design viable E-learning courses at a company like Netflix where business moves at the speed of light? The quick answer is “yes,” and “no.”  Having an amazingly short development timeline constantly forced me to isolate the most important steps of the deliverable creation process and collapse as much of my process around these key areas.  Content review, prototype evaluation, user testing? Check, check, and check.  High-end aesthetic treatment, dynamic navigational scheme, lots of formative evaluation? Not so much. A lightning fast development model is usually the only option on the table for an environment that is adverse to process and time expenditure since its web-based “storefront” reorients itself as quickly as a desert landscape in a windstorm.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with this business model: Who doesn’t love the service that Netflix brought to the market?

The reality of unreasonable time-to-market timelines can be a bit painful for E-learning professionals who generally prefer a highly detailed and systematic approach, which assigns equal value to each phase of a project. However, the reality is that the overlap of business and audience needs shift in sync with the rapidly changing technological environment—the audience demands more as technology affords more; and both are in constant flux when it comes to web-based information media and services.  In terms of E-learning at a company like Netflix, this usually meant the approach and toolset needed to accommodate quick content adaptation, incorporation of highly modularized “just-in-time” content, and tweaking assessments post release (usually a major faux pas) to accommodate newly prioritized learning objectives (ouch).  Ultimately, it also meant that if I had 40 hours to create an E-learning project, as much time as possible would obviously go into content creation and review. For those readers who aren’t familiar with nuances of rapid E-learning development, Tom Kuhlmann has one of the best blogs on this topic—The Rapid E-learning Blog.  For a deeper dive into trends shaping 21st century training in the content of information complexity, buckle your seatbelt and check out this post by Harold Jarche and Jay Cross.

Thankfully, E-learning professionals have an increasingly larger tool box to help move an organization towards being responsive to this kind of fluid environment.  Non-linear, needs-based approaches to organizing content have become more popular and this has been fortuitous for E-learning developers as this can often help solve some of the aforementioned challenges.  So, my first suggestion for those working in this kind of E-learning environment is to have an up-to-date awareness of what rapid E-learning authoring tools exist.  Check out Tony Karrer’s blog for a nice list.  For those of us working in higher education, the same need to qualify and constantly update your tool set is as important.  For digital narratives or short stories, it’s hard to beat Pachyderm, especially with the new version around the corner.  Beyond the world of the learning management system (Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) relatively new systems-oriented platforms like eXtension are offering up more opportunities for Web 2.0 content. Compressed timelines forced me to rely more often on tools like Captivate, Presenter, Camtasia, and Pachyderm than my favorite application, Adobe Flash.

I also learned from my time at Netflix that I truly did not initially grasp the depth of fluency the Millennial Generation has with technology.  My E-learning deliverables were developed primarily for Netflix Customer Service employees (about 300 individuals) who were generally in their early 20s.  I quickly found that this audience did most of their problem solving using virtual tools like IM chat (even though they sat a hundred feet from each other), demanded participation in creating the content and were exceptionally quick learners with all forms of technology.  The only consistent competency gap with this group was in writing skill. It’s not entirely surprising to me that the current trend at many universities is to pump more money into writing programs in an effort to help improve the writing skills of the incoming Millennial Generation students.  Case in point, St. Johns University recently converted 20 writing instructor positions to tenure-track (Subscription required).  Also, check out Mark Crossler’s recent Electronic Papyrus post on the topic of cross-generational characteristics.

Netflix as a whole encouraged participation across job roles and I found I was often able to leverage the technical savvy of the Millennials to help create modules and job aids for larger E-learning courses.  For example, a larger project focused on Silverlight technology forced me to temporarily manage a group of 7 or 8 technical support agents to help me develop web-based content over a two week period.   This collaboration allowed me to meet short deadlines, increase participation and helped me allocate more of my time on being more thorough with key project milestones like content creation and review, prototype creation, and usability testing—a win-win for all parties involved.

Looking for creative ways to leverage the unique technical fluency of the Millennial Generation while recognizing some of their limitations with text-based content is extremely helpful.  I see this same potential here at the university.  The Millennials can and should be more active participants in actually creating digital content that has a place in a course or the larger university’s content repository.  It goes without saying that Web 2.0 tools like blogs, YouTube, Tweeter, Ning, wikis, and IM are all familiar tools to this generation and allow much greater collaboration between student and instructor.

What are some approaches you have used to empower the Millennial Generation via your E-learning content?  How about Generation X and the Baby Boomers? You might start by asking your audience what types of web-based tools they use outside of your academic or business environment and whether or not some of your students, co-workers or audience members might be interested in contributing to the development of your E-learning content.  Who knows, it might just be a win-win.

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