Extended Learning Content Management

If you have used PowerPoint (or countless other tools, including wordprocessors and spreadsheets), you understand the concept of separating contentfrom style. With these tools, you can enter plain content and apply a number of“style sets” to it,changing its appearance.  Experienceeventually teaches users that it is a bad idea to embed styles withincontent.  With embedded styles, it is atime-consuming effort to restructure content for use in other places, where thestyles in the various re-used bits would not match or would conflict.

And yet, we routinely structure our eLearningcontent in such a way that we embed “flow.” “Flow” refers to the context or sequenceof elements. Many instructional design models, as well as most if not allauthoring tools, assume a certain strategy for instruction or learning. Eachstrategy typically involves an implicit flow, and this flow becomes embedded ineLearning as well.

This has the same undesirable consequences asin the PowerPoint example: when the designer wants to repurpose content fromvarious sources, it may require considerable effort to get everything to have aconsistent appearance, to work together, and to produce the desired results – attainment bythe learner of specific knowledge, skills, competencies, and accomplishments.Until now, we have had little choice; as we create our eLearning content, ourmodels or our tools force us to assemble it in a certain order.

However, I believe we can do better. In mycompany, Breakthrough PerformanceTech, we have developed an extensible learningcontent management system, or LCMX. This allows authors to create content thatis independent not only of style, but also of presentation flow. By using thissystem, designers can present the same content in different “looks” and (perhapsmore importantly) in different “ways.” I will present an overview of this concept in the rest of thisarticle.

Content and styles

The earliest authoring tools, such as HTMLeditors, gave designers and developers (“authors”) simple textelements that they could place on a page in order to format content.  These elements set attributes such as color,bolding, list formats, and other text enhancements, and allowed insertion ofgraphics and photographs.  Many times theauthor (or the authoring tool) embedded the formatting within the content.  The earliest software made no distinctionbetween the text that constituted the content and the text that provided theformatting.

More sophisticated tools allowed the author toenter page elements and format them independently.  With these tools, the author could apply textattributes much as one would format text in a word processing document.  A further enhancement allowed for use of “style sheets” to reformatthe text to match pre-defined or custom layout styles. 

For example, PowerPoint slide layouts andslide appearance are independent of the content appearing on those slides.  The author can choose from any of theincluded styles, download additional styles from the Internet, or even create new,custom, styles.  This is possible becausePowerPoint has separated the identity of the content and the styles applied tothat content.  It’s a familiartechnique, available in many software applications today.

But while traditional software tools such asPowerPoint have the ability to understand the separation of content and style,they don’t have an understanding of the nature of the content.

Flow in eLearning

When we author eLearning content, we don’t think interms of “pages.”  We think in terms of context. For example, if I were to gather content on a given topic, I might thinkof an introduction, some examples, some common questions, some commonmisperceptions, maybe some typical objections, perhaps some examples ofapplication, and maybe some case studies. As I go to build my course, I have to try to figure out a good way forthe lesson to flow.  Do I want to have mycommon questions come before or after my case studies?  Do I want my objections near the beginning ornear the end?

If the Learning Content Management Systemdoesn’t have anunderstanding of the context of each element of content, the author mustrearrange the content on the basis of the pages where it resides.  This limitation forces the author tomanipulate the content on the software’s terms, versusmanaging it on the author’s terms. The author, of course, understands the context of thedata.  Authors should be able to say, “I want to showthe examples before covering common questions” – or viceversa.  Authors should not have to gointo every page, see what is on that page, and then move those pages aroundmanually.

Moving pages around is a very poor way tomanage flow, just as setting individual font attributes on every element oftext is a very poor way to manage styles.

Flow is also a concern when we begin to lookat alternate devices, such as mobiles. If the screen real estate is too small, we might have to present ourdata differently; “zoom and pan” of oversized content layouts would be awkward for thelearner.  As a result, when programmingfor mobiles authors often have to “start over” – perhaps evenusing different tools.

We accept this as a limitation of thetechnology – but it doesn’t have to be so.

eXtensibility – from XML to LCMX

Consider Hypertext Markup Language, morecommonly known as “HTML.”  Originally, HTML was supposed to simply apply display attributes to text.  The “markup language” was limited todealing with appearance. Text could be “bold,” or “italics,” or items in a “list.”  While the designer could manipulate theappearance of the text, there was no way to define the purpose of thetext.  Was this a person’s name, or anaddress?  Was this a sales order, or a listof ingredients for cookies?

But why should the list of tags be limited todescribing text attributes?

And so, with theappearance of the “eXtensible Markup Language” (XML) in thelate 1990’s, a revolution was born.  With XML, designers cantag text not only with how it looks,but also with the purpose it serves.  The brilliance of XML is that it isself-defining. XML tags can define the structure of the data, thus providingunlimited eXtensibility. (Editor’s note: For much moreinformation on XML and related topics, see the three-part series of articles inLearning Solutions Magazine by HenryMeyerding, “XMLand Content Reuse Systems for Instructional Design.”)

Because of the XML tags on data, applications caneasily go in and extract just exactly what they need for each particularpurpose.  For example, to create a physical letter, an application can select a customer’s salutation, formal name, and mailing address.  If the user wants to generate an e-mail, theapplication can select an informal greeting along with the e-mail address. Inthis way, an extensible system allows the reshaping and restructuring of data.

It is this power of self-definingextensibility that makes an eXtended LCMS (like LCMX) possible.

Independent style and flow

Unlike PowerPoint, an eXtended LCMS uses XMLto support independent style andflow. To explain the power of this approach, let’s comparecontent entry in PowerPoint versus content entry in (for example) LCMX.

When you author content using PowerPoint, youcan start by simply typing in the content, knowing that you are going to beapplying a specific formatting style later. You don’t worry about defining fonts and colors and sizes of everything.

With LCMX authoring, you start at the samepoint.  Enter the content text, and don’t worry aboutapplying fonts or colors or sizes – you will beapplying a style template later.  So far,this is the same as with PowerPoint.

In PowerPoint authoring, you do have to placeyour content into definitions that are meaningful to PowerPoint.  For example, you have to identify whatcontent goes on each page, and set the order of the pages.  As you do this, you are applying PowerPoint’s definitionsto your data.  For example, “This is thepage 1 body text” or “this is the page 2 illustration.”

With LCMX authoring, you don’t initiallyplace your content on any pages at all. Rather, you identify it by its potential future uses.  For example, you can specify, “This is acommon question that somebody would ask about this topic,” and then, “This is anexcellent answer to that common question.”  Furthermore, you can enter that data inseveral different formats.  In thisexample you could provide the text of the question and answer, an audio clip of thequestion and answer, or even video clips of people asking the question andproviding the answer.  And just as youenter this content without “formatting,” you enter this content without “flow.”  At this point, you are only providing content– you do notneed to bog down in how it will look, or where you will use it.

Going back to PowerPoint, we commonly acceptthat we don’t need to specify the appearance of all the individual textelements.  We know that, at the proper time, we will beapplying a “style template” for all of our content to make it pretty.

With the extended learning content managementapproach, we will not be applying one template – but two.  First, we have the same “style template” that governsthe appearance of the content – much as wehave in PowerPoint.  The difference isthat the LCMX also offers a “flow template” that allows it to govern the presentation methodology of the content.

With a software tool like PowerPoint, youenter content independent of style.  Withthe LCMX, you enter content independent of style and flow.  What this allowsyou to do is to reshape and re-visualize your content in an infinite number ofways.  By applying style and flowtemplates, we can find a look that conveys our intentions in a visuallypleasing way as well as find the way of presenting our content that bestfacilitates effective learning and results in a pleasing overall experience.

Leveraging learning content

In the LCMX, what we want the learners tolearn is broken down into different levels, such as “courses” and “learningobjects.”  For our purposes, we cansimply refer to this as “Learning Content.”

The second element, “Style Sets,” defines how wewant that content to look.  In the LCMX,this not only includes common style elements such as font size, color, andplacement on a page – but also elements such as the protocol in which to deliver thecontent.  In effect, choosing to displaya video in .MP4 or .WMV format is no different than choosing to display a pagetitle in red or blue – you simply select that which best suits your needs andaesthetic tastes.

The third element is the flow in which we wantto present our content.  In the LCMX,we call this the “learning framework.”  You often don’t have theluxury of selecting an independent learning framework.  (Some tools do indeed have flow templates,but you must shape your data to fit the flow template as you enter it – this is asignificant difference!).  While manyauthoring approaches don’t include a standalone learning flow at all, the learning frameworkserves as the bedrock of the LCMX architecture – providing thebasic structure of the learning experience independent of appearance orcontent.

It is important to note that, in the LCMX, youenter your content and flow independently, and you can mix and match them inany combination.  Consider Figure 1,where we have three sets of Learning Content, three Style Sets, and threeLearning Frameworks.

Figure 1. The elements of an extended learning contentmanagement system.

Since the LCMX starts with a library of stylesets and learning frameworks, if you entered those three content sets you couldimmediately generate each set of content following the flow of all of thelearning frameworks, and have them available in all of the available style setsfor all supported devices – desktop and mobile alike. You could release them all to your learner community, or choose to offercertain content in only a handful of flows that work particularly well for thatspecific content.  Only your imagination limits the possibilities, and through the simplicity of LCMX-styleauthoring that totally isolates content, you can literally create all of thosecourses very quickly – complete with automatically generated animations and formatting.

Closing

By separating Content, Style and Flow, andintegrating extensibility, an extended Learning Content Management Systemallows courseware authors to leverage their learning content and present it incountless different ways for a wide variety of target platforms and in a remarkablyshort timeframe. 

I believe this is an important concept, worthyof the time it takes to understand it, and you will be able to see a demonstrationof it at DevLearn 2011 in Las Vegas, where we are launching our LCMX as anoffering.