Responsibilities of the e-learning professional

In the course of an e-learning project, the myriad of job roles can be associated with three main areas of responsibility: the e-learning manager, responsible for establishing the e-learning strategy and managing individual projects; the developer, for designing e-learning programmes and producing the content; and the e-tutor, responsible for supporting e-learners when the learning is in progress. The following table shows how roles can be allocated to each of these, although in practice there’s a fair degree of overlap.

E-learning roles

Manager	Developer	Tutor
Strategist	Instructional designer	Administrator
Learning analyst	Writer	Coach
Project manager	Graphic designer	Subject-matter expert
Marketeer	Programmer Author Audio-visual specialist Tester	Assessor

There are few rules about the job descriptions in e-learning, so all sorts of combinations occur in practice. The same person may act as project manager, instructional designer, writer and author; another may fill all the roles of the e-tutor; yet another specialise in graphic design alone. As we’ve already discussed, there are arguments for making a distinction between specialists and generalists, but some organisations prefer to multi-skill across the board.

Marilyn Clarke is a Multimedia Learning Author for the insurers Clerical Medical and is part of a team of four serving the company’s 2-3000 employees: “As a small team, we all have to be competent in each of the tasks involved in e-learning development. We may have preferences for certain tasks over others, but, with training, we’re able to undertake them all.” The same applies at law firm Herbert Smith, where a small team of three, including a manager, provides specialised e-learning content for an organisation of 1600 employees. Gail Nugent is an e-Learning Consultant: “We carry out all aspects of the project in-house from the initial marketing, to liaising with subject experts, design, graphics and authoring. The only technical help we’ve needed is in publishing to the intranet!”

The bigger the team, the more likely that specialisation will occur. At e-peopleserve, a team of about 40 people has been developing technology-based training materials since the early 80s. Eric Farnworth is e-Learning Design Manager: “We have enough of a team to specialise, so we separate out project management from design. We employ graphic designers and authors. We even have a QA expert responsible for testing. It’s our experience that specialists work quicker than generalists and now we can recruit them directly from outside, where 20 years ago we had to grow all our own skills.”