There is a big choice which you have to make about learning materials. Are you going a use of the peg learning materials, possibly coming as part of a package bought in form an e-learning provider, or will you develop or commission customised learning materials.

There is an obvious advantage to customised learning materials. They can be designed to meet the precise needs of your organisation and staff. This can be important if the training needs are very specific and means learners do not have cover material which is not relevant to their everyday work. The disadvantage is cost. High quality, interactive learning materials can be very expensive to develop.

On the other hand, there are now very good learning off the shelf learning materials which can be quite cheap. Many e-learning providers will include the cost of materials as part of providing a course. The problem is that these learning materials tend to be in subject and topic areas with very high demand - such as management, language learning and Information and Communication Technologies.

Many learning materials are also only available in limited language versions. Furthermore, research suggests that to localise learning materials you need to go beyond translation or even graphics. People form different cultures learn in different ways and learning materials need to reflect that. I would also suggest that people from different occupations may approach learning in different ways. An obvious example is language learning - a very popular e-learning subject. Engineers may need different language learning materials than marketing managers or sales representatives.

There may be other options than off the shelf or fully customised materials. There are increasingly available learning materials released in the public domain. The British Broadcasting Corporation, like other public bodies, has a large-scale project to make all its content freely available for learning.

A number of education institutions are also making their learning materials available under licences which allow them to be freely used. MIT in America has committed itself to publishing all its learning materials on the internet and the University of Rice in Texas Connexions project publishes free courseware.

Many materials are now being published under the new Creative Commons License which allows varying degrees of free use.

One feature of the Creative Commons Licence is that some variants allow materials to be amended to meet particular needs.

It may be perfectly possible to assemble free material to develop your own customised learning programme, especially if your trainers have some skills in this area.

A word of warning, though. Copyright laws are very complex. Make sure you are entitled to reproduce any materials you find on the web.

Remember too, that learning materials are not the be all and end all of e-learning. The interaction between learners may be more important than the learning materials. In a previous publication I also suggested that the products produced by learners in the course of an e-learning project could form learning materials for future students. In this way we can develop an e-cology of e-learning materials!

10.1 Key issues

• What sort of learning materials do learners in your enterprise need?
• What learning materials do you already have – computer based or otherwise?
• What learning materials are already available that meet your learners’ needs?
• How much customisation would available materials require to meet your learners’ needs