Atomic content and the new learning architecture
How we can now move away from the course being the default unit of learning
I’m afraid far too many people in Learning & Development believe that their LMS needs to be filled with content to be successful.
In fact, I’ve come across many situations where, to justify the expense made on the LMS, every piece of content (including videos) gets packaged as SCORM and imported as a course.
And then they wonder why no one is using their content?
As soon as you put your content into a SCORM package you severely limit how people will get to it. Yes, your LMS might have a search engine, but it will only find the title, and maybe some descriptive text if you’re lucky. It will not search inside the package.
Similarly, your LMS might have a catalogue, but that’s not going to help anyone find and quickly navigate to the materials inside your SCORM packages.
Free your content
For content to be used and useful, I would suggest it should have two characteristics:
- It should be addressable - users should be able to link to each individual page
- It should be searchable - so that users can do full text searches
If you'd like to discuss this article, or how I can help you, get in touch.
Posted: 09 June 2017
Tags: Content management Information architecture Solution design
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