Obviously, my mind shifted to learning as Nigel’s example got me immediately thinking about how we can apply these same mash-up concepts to traditional instructor-led training materials like study guides, manuals, and presentations. While training departments have been busy spending ridiculous amounts of time and money converting these training materials to e-Learning, Steve Jobs has (surprise!) changed the game by providing us with a new direct channel for ILT materials – the eBook. While eBooks of course aren’t new, the iPad now affords training departments the opportunity to add dynamic and interactive media to textbooks and other traditional learning media. In his insightful Influential Marketing blog post How The iPad Will Transform Mainstream Media (But NOT The Web), Rohit Bhargava provides a great description how the iPad will affect traditional textbooks:

“The one prediction I have heard that I do agree with is how the tablet could change the way that we read books. Everything from integrated links and images to live note-taking, to sharing notes with others in your community are all major shifts in behavior when it comes to reading books. For students, the other major benefit (in time) could be that finally you don’t need to lug tons and tons of books around with you for any class, you can just load them up on a tablet or iPad device. Even more importantly, the ease of sharing notes around a particular book will make reading and studying much more informed and perhaps lead to a next generation version of Cliffs Notes where you can get the context of a certain piece by how others have described it.”

And Aptara, in their article iPad: What Does it Really Mean for Content Publishers, provides an excellent illustration of what learning on these devices might look like (you may click on the image for a larger view):

So here we are. The industry is rapidly reaching a point where eLearning is no longer the center of the universe. Training departments who don’t recognize the tremendous implications this will have on their learning content development strategy risk facing significant consequences in terms of profitability and competitiveness.

Apple’s announcement underscores the fact that we are seeing a rapid shift towards standards adherence and open content formats. If you followed the iPad announcement, you will have noticed that Apple embraces a free and open eBook standard called ePub. This non-proprietary media format provides a way to have your traditional print materials in digital format. This is key opportunity for educational publishers, many of whom have already adopted the ePub standard, to realize an even greater ROI on their eBook investment.

So, in less than five years, Mr. Jobs has revolutionized two new delivery channels. We have all heard the advocates of blended learning, and with the introduction of mobile delivery and now the imminent ubiquity of eBooks, it’s time to ask yourself: Does it really make sense to have multiple tools and multiple copies of the content for each of these new delivery formats? Of course not! The time has come for the training industry to let go of their silos and proprietary formats and embrace a single-source content development model. Bob Mosher, in his PERFORMER Support: Learning @ the Moment of Need blog, provides his view of why single-source matters:

“Single-source publishing seems to be the tie that binds when it comes to effectively designing and integrating PS into an already vibrant learning strategy. Most organizations already use too many tools with redundant outputs and out-of-date content. Single-Source publishing has finally come of age and can do an amazing job of serving outputs for all 5 moments of need.”

Training organizations have to be agile and ready to immediately adapt to these new formats with learning content that is open and future-proofed. Are you ready, or is it time to rethink your single-source strategy?

“A counter-intuitive tip for mastering change is to start by wallowing in the feelings of dread it arouses. The sheer nail-biting horror of it all. Get in touch with every negative aspect, all the things that could go wrong. Then figure out a way to get that negative force on your side. In short, Dream your worst nightmare and invest in it.”

Nowhere in the learning industry today are stakeholders facing greater change than in the move towards single-source learning. The dream is grand one: content reusability, multi-modal delivery and real-time customization – all from a single source of enterprise content to meet the requirements of learners worldwide.

But what we often tend to overlook when launching these projects is that single-source is a paradigm shift for almost everyone involved, affecting directly and indirectly all aspects of learning production. Content authors, subject matter experts, instructional designers, management, and various stakeholders will all witness major changes one way or another. If we don’t invest in our stakeholder’s nightmare, we breed fear, the kind of fear that can bring any single-source initiative to its knees.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with some project leaders across industries that are in various stages of their single-source learning initiatives: I was interested in the change management issues they faced and what steps they took to effectively manage and overcome these potential obstacles. While you can read the entire conversation here, I’ve condensed this into sort of a job aid for single-source change management.

The Top Ten List for Investing in Your Single-Source Nightmare:

1. Clearly set expectations that things are going to change: While the richness of the content will not change, its format, wording and structure will. Therefore, it’s crucial to communicate what changes to expect and the benefits of doing things in this new fashion.
2. Educate your stakeholders: Each stakeholder needs to understand how these changes will affect them directly so they can effectively plan for addressing and controlling that change.
3. Set aside pre-conceptions: Single-source is an evolutionary step for content development but will not be effective unless a shift in mindset takes place up-front. So be open-minded to the process.
4. Invest more early on: Focus initial resources on planning content strategy, content design and content management practices within a single-source environment so that changes do not have an unexpected and negative impact.
5. Give your content design breathing room: Designers need to go through transient stage when learning how to separate content from presentation, so provide the extra time they require up-front.
6. Plan for content reuse: For content design, don’t think solely in terms of sentences and paragraphs but also in terms of “once it is written, how I am going to use for different outputs?”
7. Identify shared content: Separate audience-specific content from content that can be shared throughout the enterprise, then make shared content context-neutral.
8. Make content searchable: Speed to market will depend on the ability to quickly find topics for updates, course assembly and rendering to different outputs.
9. Start with a high impact project: Make sure project provides many opportunities for content reuse and touches many deliverables so everyone can see the value.
10. Market the advantages: For those people that will not experience the changes directly, make sure you market the benefits gained to them.

Are there any other best practices that can be added to the list?

In contrast, Xyleme LCMS is a “component-based, XML publishing solution”. Following a proven single source XML model, you can reuse content at very low levels. For example, this means that you can take a paragraph out of a topic originally written for instructor-led training and reuse it inside of a page in a web course. Or show the steps in a procedure in the remediation loop of an assessment. This is particularly important when creating multiple derivatives of courses which vary only slightly in content.

XML-based publishing systems have extraordinary return on investment results. They have been proven this over time across many industries. By applying these same techniques to learning content, we can achieve extraordinary ROI results for training and development departments as well.

Suppose you wanted to have the same course materials offered in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. You have an on-line course, a Word-based study guide and PowerPoint-based instructor slides to update. In the XML-based world, we can have the same course dynamically substitute “Labour” for “Labor”, “Familiarise” for “Familiarize” and more complex phrases like “Chartered Accountant” for “Certified Public Accountant”. I am not talking about a find and replace and copying to a new file. Or cutting and pasting into a new file. Then spending a lot of time re-checking the formatting. In Xyleme LCMS, a simple operation does this for you automatically. We are able to manipulate and transform component content while maintaining a single source of content. It’s all in the underlying XML technology for building, storing and publishing reusable learning content.

As I said above, I am not surprised by the study about LCMS and RLO’s. The traditional approach for creating asset-based objects has some utility, but if you want to dramatically improve the return on investment, you should be thinking about moving to component-based learning content development.

My first job out of graduate school was as an Interactive Designer for a small but growing multimedia development firm. I was hired to be part of a multi-million dollar project for a major automotive manufacturer. We were creating CD-ROM based training for service technicians. Each course cost over $1 million dollars! They were fantastic, cutting-edge, pushing the envelope in every way.

Fast forward to today… budgets and timelines are shrinking, your audience is global and change is a constant thing. Combine that with the fact approximately 70% of all training is still delivered instructor- led and what are you to do? Now-a-days it’s about getting something up quickly that is the right content, in the right size to the right device so employees and customers can do what they need to do.

So how do you get there? One approach being used by a number of our clients is a strategy of “iterative” improvement, moving in stages from pure instructor-led to a blended model. The idea is to start with your instructor-led materials… be they Word, FrameMaker or PowerPoint, and get them into a single-source content model. This will allow you to “publish” all of the classroom materials (Instructor Guide, Student Guide, Slide Deck, Wall Chart, Handouts, Classroom Setup, etc.) and ALSO get your first “iteration” on e-Learning, what you might refer to as “e-Learning Lite”. Once you have a structure to react to, you can look for places where the instructor led approach just doesn’t work online. Once you’ve found places that need something different for online delivery, you can start to create alternative content with interactions and richer media. From the single source of content, you can now tag those pieces only to be used in the e-Learning and keep the original content for the instructor-led course.

For example, let’s say that you’re teaching a technical product. In the instructor-led version of the course, you might do a live demo but for the e-Learning you’d use a recorded demo. Or in an instructor-led course you might have students identify parts of a piece of equipment by pointing to it in the room, but online you could create an image map to accomplish the same thing. In addition, maybe you add some audio narration to cover the highlight of each section or some video where needed.

Rather than trying to build the “$1 Million course”, this approach immediately let’s you exploit your existing content, get some benefits of moving on-line and make improvements as your budget permits. In other words, start where you are today and make things better over time.

It’s the same with developing learning content. It’s about making the hard things easy to do. What are the hard things in developing learning content? Content changes, customization and reusing content. Most instructional designers can describe in detail how they initially create content, how the tools they use are easy and how they have their own standards for new content development. Ask them to go change the words “sales person” to “marketing professional” in all of the materials for an instructor-led course (instructor guide, student guide, handouts, PowerPoint slides, etc.) and you get that ‘pained expression” as they think about going into multiple files and making edits one file at a time.

How about an on-line course where the same content is shared by multiple locations, such as service centers or manufacturing plants? The scenario where 90% is the same but 10% is different. How would you handle this in your tool? Create a course for each location? Copy and paste?

At Xyleme, we have an XML publishing system that makes these hard things easy to do. Since everything is stored as native XML content, we have one source of content and can use “filters” to dynamically publish for each location. With Xyleme, you simply choose “publish for location 1”, “publish for location 2”, etc. and in a couple of minutes you can have all of the materials you need for each service center or manufacturing plant. With Xyleme, you simply choose “substitute marketing professional for sales person” and in a couple of minutes you have new materials for a new customer or partner. You don’t need to update multiple documents, courses, files, etc.

It’s about making the hard things easy.

It’s about Publishing Your Way to Content Success.

What happens every time something has to change? EEEKKKKK!

1. Open the Instructor Guide make the change
2. Open the Student Guide, make the same changes
3. Open the PowerPoint, make the same changes… oh just thought of a better way to say that (repeat steps 1 and 2)
4. Open the Web Course and make the same change
5. Save and deploy
6. Oops, someone noticed a error in the new content….
7. Bang your head against your desk and start all over again….
8. Oh.. almost forgot about the Spanish, French and German versions… need to do the same thing in all those files too!

Ah… now I get why there’s so much interest in Single-Source Learning Content Development. While people understand the problem, they don’t yet understand how they can really create one source of content . Well help is here. That’s why we developed an upcoming webinar, to show you exactly how it can be done. With a combination of conceptual overview, really users case study and walking through an example in detail, you’ll hopefully leave say… Ah Ha, I see how it’s possible.

Please join us to explore this critical import topic, especial during these turbulent times.

Each time I’ve given this talk I get this question, “I can totally see the benefits of this approach, but I have lots of legacy content in Word. How do I get that into XML?”
A question that I have also come across in some blogs and forums (Berman, Bytes).

There are a few approaches:

1. Custom Transformations: If you have been very disciplined with the way you’ve used the outlining and style features of Word, the mapping from Word to XML elements can be tailored to automatically convert your word documents into XML maintaining most, if not all, your structure and style information.
2. Standard Transformation: If you’ve at least used the outlining feature in Word (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) it is possible to detect and re-create the structure and content elements (list, tables, text, images) and automatically convert the documents to XML.
3. Raw Transformation: If you have not used the outline or style features of Word it is still possible to detect and re-create the content elements (list, tables, text, images) automatically. You just need to organize the content into modules, lessons, topics or chapter and topics as you see fit.

In addition you can consider rather than swallowing the whole elephant in one bite, just begin using an XML authoring and publishing approach for all new development or as you revise courses, convert them at that point.