Xyleme Learning Blog

I just returned from London where I had an amazing couple of days learning more about Reusability 2.0!

I started at the NetDimensions User Conference, where I had the opportunity to give a presentation about Learning Content Management and Reusability 2.0 (thank you Jay Shaw for inviting me). My presentation followed one by John Catlin, CEO of Tactics Consulting, who had spent the hour before me discussing the case for reusable content. John and his firm have a wealth of experience with single source content development and reviewed his work at several of clients in Australia who they had helped successfully implement reusable content solutions. He explained the “why “and I got to follow with the “how” (Xyleme LCMS). John really made my job a lot easier. And the funny part is, while John and I met briefly about year ago, I hadn’t spoken to him since and didn’t know what he was going to present. Thank you John for preceding me!

I started my presentation by asking a group of 50 or so learning professionals about how they like to learn. I started with the following slide about the “Five Moments of Need” (once again thank you Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson), and proceeded to ask the audience about their preferences. The results were very interesting.

Not one single person in the audience selected an online course for any Moment of Need! There were several instructor-led responses for Learning for the First Time, but by and large, the answers were “read, search, watch or call for help”. Think about that. What the audience said was they wanted a variety of learning outputs, all of which needed to present the same content in different formats. What the audience said was they preferred “on-demand” information rather than “event based” learning. What the audience said was give me the information how I want, when I want it, and in the amount I want it. That’s Reusability 2.0.

Now I am not suggesting that online courses are not important. They are very important. The benefits are clear for many types of training. But what is also clear is that you can’t simply think “let me build some online courses and that will solve my training problem”. But there’s the rub…How can I quickly, cost effectively and easily build all of these outputs for learner’s moments of needs? After all, I have a fixed number of developers, my budget is tight and I don’t have much time…Try Reusability 2.0.

My fascinating day continues…I went from the NetDimensions User Conference to visit with a prospective client. They are a company with an exciting new product that is so secretive they couldn’t tell me anything about what the product is! So here I am listening to a couple of folks in this small training group telling me why they need reusable content and how putting their content in XML is going to save them huge amounts of time and money. How the return on investment is an easy sell to their executives and how delivering a variety of outputs is core to training employees, partners and customers. They understood the benefits and explained in detail to me why content management was the center of their learning strategy. While they also are looking for a Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver the SCORM courses they develop, their number one priority is getting the right learning content management solution. We like that J

Reusability 2.0 is catching on, even with smaller companies who historically would have gone out and bought a proprietary LCMS from an LMS vendor or a stand-alone authoring tool just to “get some courseware out there”.

And then in the evening I ate some great Indian food. The Red Fort in Soho. I highly recommend it. Quite a day in London!

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