Good Enough, Everywhere

I recently spoke with Elliott Masie in advance of Learning2007, which is coming up in Orlando later this month. Elliott was kind enough to allow me to record a podcast with him which you can listen at:
http://www.learning2007.com/podcasts/supplier-podcasts/xyleme.html

One of the themes I spoke about in our discussion was the idea of “Good Enough, Everywhere”. What I mean by that is that being able to deliver learning content, in context, in multiple formats, is taking priority over having a single, high production value output. This doesn’t mean that great courseware design and media development is going away, but rather that organizations are looking for ways to speed the development and update process. And fundamentally, that’s what we do at Xyleme.

Good Enough, Everywhere means that you are able to develop and deliver learning content in smaller and easier to consume units. It means changing your development processes so that the center of design is not building the slickest media that you can, but rather adding appropriate levels of video, audio, and images to the text, allowing learners to get at information quickly, in the format they desire.

Good Enough, Everywhere means that whereas before you might have designed a course and then thought about how to deal with the follow on performance support materials, now you think about online courses, instructor led materials, mobile learning and performance support together. You can’t spend 90% of your time and budget on one output. You have to think ahead about the content may be reused for different audiences and types of outputs.

Good Enough, Everywhere means that you need to start putting content at the center of your learning strategy. While LMS vendors may take exception, building a reusable learning content management strategy is much more important than how you deliver it. If you design the right learning content strategy, one built around Reusability 2.0, you can rapidly build and deploy content as needed though your LMS, portal or whatever service you choose.

If you start by looking at all of the outputs you need to develop and all of the audiences you need to serve (customers, partners, employees by job role), you will quickly see that you really need a content strategy that looks at different learning contexts and different delivery formats, which means multiple ways of accessing and presenting content. If you don’t design your strategy up front, you’ll probably wind up with One Great Format, Can’t Reuse Anywhere – the exact opposite of Good Enough, Everywhere. And history shows that once you do this, the costs of maintaining and reusing content grow astronomically.

Hope to see you at Learning 2007. We will be hosting two sessions:

- Reusability 2.0: The Proof is in the ROI on Monday, October 22 at 1:45 pm
- Reusability 2.0: Design and Reuse of Learning Content on Tuesday October 23 at 10:00 am

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 7:18 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.