eLearning Experts / Evidence

Maintenance is the cost nobody budgets

A course is a liability from the day it launches.

Online courses are funded as projects and behave as assets requiring maintenance. Content goes out of date, links break, screenshots show interfaces that no longer exist, and regulatory references become wrong. A course that is three years old and unmaintained is teaching some things that are no longer true.

The maintenance burden is largely determined by design decisions made at build. Content baked into video is expensive to update; the same content as text is cheap. Screenshots of a third party system will age; a description of the task will not. Choosing the cheaper-to-maintain form at build is worth a great deal over a course's life.

A modest discipline covers most of it: a named owner, an annual check of anything referencing an external system or a rule, and a log of what was changed. Without an owner the check does not happen, and the first indication of a problem is a learner following instructions that no longer work.

Retirement should also be planned. A course nobody enrols in still appears in the catalogue, still returns in search, and still represents the organisation, and removing it is a decision somebody has to make.

It is worth deciding at build time who will own the course afterwards and telling them. A course handed to a team that did not know it was becoming theirs will not be maintained, and the first indication is a learner reporting that a link is dead or that an instruction refers to a system that was replaced.