This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 9:40 am by Mark and is filed under Reusability 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
After the question, “Will reusable learning objects work?”, the next most frequent question is ,“Will this require big changes for my instructional designers, writers and SMEs?”
There is absolutely no question that moving to an XML-based reusable learning content strategy will require changes to the content development process. When coming from stand-alone, output specific tools that provide a free form authoring style without regard for content reuse, implementing XML-based reusable learning content requires moving to a structured authoring paradigm. In this style of development, content is separated from the presentation and style choices are automated in advance as much as possible. With a reusability 2.0 content strategy, upfront analysis is required to standardize authoring and publishing templates for everyone on the team. Style guides need to be more thoroughly developed to cater for publishing to multiple learning channel formats in a consistent way.
While this all requires more upfront work, the downstream benefits are tremendous. When there is a change, you go to one place, make the edit, and it is automatically propagated to all of your learning products where the changed content is used. If you need to deliver personalized learning content by job role, location, or other profile, you can automate the content assembly process, without copying, duplicating and reinventing the wheel each time.
“Why should we change?”, the team will ask. The response is simple. What is more difficult, asking a relatively small group of instructional designers, writers and SMEs to learn a new process with less freedom than they had before, or asking thousands of employees/learners to deal with missing, out of date or inconsistent content in their moment of need?
Without a reusable learning content strategy, you either have inefficient and costly development processes or out-of-synch content between all of the various learning products you produce. Either way, the problem only gets worse over time as new developments and content changes increase. The return on investment by moving to Reusability 2.0 is measurable in terms of producing more and better quality content with lower costs and shorter development and update times. With a couple of days of training, instructional designers and writers manager will become quite proficient developing reusable content in the Xyleme LCMS. And less time than that for SMEs.
There is going to be change. Either accept this fact and design it into the content development process or condemn all of your learners to getting less than what they need, when they need it.
Can you imagine a situation where your customers got conflicting or outdated information from your marketing brochures, sales personnel and web site? It’s quite certain that someone at the C-level of the organization would want to figure out how to fix that immediately. Why is it different for one of your learners in their moment of need?
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