Learning Content Is Not Your Job Any More: The Effect of Convergence

There are two new rules forprofessionals with responsibilities in the generation and productionof content for knowledge acquisition. Rule One: You are nolonger in the business of learning content development and delivery.Rule Two: You are in the business of bringing dexterity toyour content.

I am pretty satisfied that mostof you are already aware of the convergence between “learningcontent” and all other “content” in your organization. Some ofyou may be wrestling with what the move means to your organization,while others of you may be undertaking innovations or changes in yourlearning technology to accommodate the change. And, for those of youwho are new to this viewpoint, or who want to argue it, humor me andjust read along anyway.

The urge to converge

Here’s what is happening behindthis notion about convergence. As learning professionals we fosteredthe belief that content prepared for learning environments standsapart from other content. In fact, we’ve been so convinced of itthat there is a multi-billion dollar business built around it,consisting of technology and services to reinforce the position thattraining and development resources are something unique. And, wemanaged to get away with this concept about the significance oflearning content because adult education bestowed a particularcredence on the content’s worth for having the label of “course,”or similar tagged reference.

However, our conventionalthinking about content for learning purposes was just hijacked; and,we are partially culprits. It came about as we increased our relianceon the technology of search, and expanded our uses of technology toproduce content from elemental sources. These sources range fromthings like Word and PowerPoint documents to more intricate authoringand editing tools that let us work with audio and video or otherdigital media assets. All of a sudden, everyone is a content authorand publisher.

There are innumerable books andreference materials about uses of the tools and instructional designconcepts to apply to the outputs. The learning industry opened up anability to be a content developer for anyone who could pay the modestpurchase price of the software. And, now we can do it real-time fromjust about any digital device. Don’t believe me? Look at what folksare doing for learning experiences with YouTube, Vimeo, UpStream, andnow my favorite Aurasma, in the video-on-demand world.

Next, our new generation ofworkers, the millennials, are intensifying the speed of this change,because to them content really is just content. When it comes to howthey learn, the newest online experiences find them deciding whatthey want and how they want it, along with where they want it. Nowhold onto this concept, because the story gets better.

It’s not enough thatwe have this convergence of content, but there’s another situationworsening the scenario. It’s “big data.” The world is producingtoo much of it; and, much of this content is unlike our well-formedcontent in neatly packaged courses with nicely structured curriculum.This unstructured content does not even benefit from anyspecial orchestration to make it easily accessible.

And, if you are in a“knowledge-intensive enterprise,” the chances are that yourorganization is slam up against these digital data mega-challenges:

• A confluence of new technologies and business models, e.g. social media;

• Exponential increases in the consumption and delivery of information;

• Boundless proliferation and generation of content; and

• An inundation of smart devices and an explosion in apps for them.

So, for you all this changeprovokes a must contend scenario, in which you should haveshifted gears to wrestle with a myriad of issues around understandingand managing content complexity. The hyper-complex contenttransformation and transmission landscape requires that we rethinkour content and learning strategies and respond with an arsenal ofcapabilities, including the ability to create new models forproviding access to, and uses of, content. The response to thesechallenges has everything to do with you and your work withtechnology to improve all aspect of the content, and especially theuser experience.

Suffice it to say that you are tobe a different kind of person doing very different things to supportyour organization’s ability to meet its business goals and to alignthe business with the demands of everyone in its value chain. I havetwo directions to take you. Are you ready?

Intelligent content engineering

First, the organization has toget a real serious grasp of its content. There are important “bestpractices” with which to render content manageable, to enhance itssearchability, and to produce it in formats that collectively createremarkable new value for the content.

I call this “intelligentcontent engineering,” a concept defined by and belonging to JoeGollner (among a select few). In his blog in January this year, Joeexplains intelligent content this way: “It is content that has beenconsciously designed to be manageable and reusable such thatautomation can be efficiently applied to the discovery and deliveryof the content in an unlimited range of contexts and in formats thatsatisfy the intended purposes of the content consumers.” (See thereferences at the end of the article.)

If you can produce content foryour organization as Joe defines it, you just satisfied a big outcryfrom our millennials, when they petition you to give them what theywant. You might note that nowhere in the definition is there a wordabout courses, curriculum, or learning management. Joe doesunderscore two concepts – search (discovery) and distribution(delivery), while also promoting contextualizing content.

I’m not about to advocateabandoning what we formally do to produce, manage, track, and reporton content use and users. Mostly, the value has as much to do withthe analytics, as with the impact on what the learner took away fromthe learning event. It’s important to know that we prompt andpersuade our folks to encourage their learning, and that we haveindicators about the use and results of use of learning experiences.

Yet, the reality is that theinvestment and efforts for formal education and training representonly 10% of learning and development, as espoused by Robert Eichingerand Michael Lomdardo of The Center for Creative Leadership. Theyfurther point out that 20% of learning occurs through other peopleinformally, or formally through coaching and mentoring; and, 70%takes place from real life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, andproblem-solving. So, let me jump back to Joe. Before we expendresources of whatever magnitude to produce any content, we must giveregard to what it is, where it is going, and what it is to do for theorganization and its consumer.

Build a strategy

For content to be intelligent,you begin by building a content strategy. While there’s no room inthis article to dig into that topic, make note of two points. One,you have to know what your audiences are looking for from yourorganization; and, two, you have to make sure content supports keyobjectives of the organization.

These points might seem like a nobrainer. We often conduct requirements analysis in our professionalpractices. So, here’s some numbers to consider. Above 70% ofenterprise organizations have a LMS and use various learningtechnology methods for 40% of learning hours, including mobile, butless than 20% of them can produce a formal learning strategydocument, with only 6.5% having defined a content strategy within it.(See Gerry Kranz’s article in the References.)

In times of dramatic change, likenow, the shift occurring from the digital disruption introduced bymobile technology demands nothing short of a transformative strategyin what we are doing with content. Regular news stories on mobile andbroadband topics confirm it.

Produce intelligent content for mobile learning

Therefore, a strategy to produceintelligent content must represent the means to build skill andagility at exploring, exposing, extracting, and exploiting contentvalue – especially if the output is about gaining newunderstanding, insights, or skills. You have to know how to movecontent into, through, and out to your consumers in forms that engageand ignite use in the ways that your consumers need and want.Successfully undertaking intelligent content engineering will keepthe organization on top of its game and in front of its competitorsin these times of incredibly accelerated content expansion.

What does intelligent contentlook like? The actual manifestation goes back to the Gollnerdefinition. The content has “… an unlimited range of contexts andin formats that satisfy the intended purposes of the contentconsumers.” With that in mind, I’m going to narrow the responseparticularly to mobile learning.

A big part of what your contentstrategy for mobile will do is commit you to what Dr. Gary Woodilldescribes as: “relevant activity from which the learner is able togain new insights and knowledge.” The quote is from Chapter 3 (page66) in The Mobile Learning Edge where he goes through sevenprinciples associated with producing “relevance” for mobilelearning and advances the argument that context matters.

Mobile technology is a tool foraugmenting the learner experience. The value of the technology goesup when the device supports what is already going on in the learner’sexperience. The content can have situational and possibly locationalcontext. The relevance in this case can be job specific, project ortask specific, or work-collaboration specific. And, what the learneris able to retrieve from the smart appliance is in a particularformat suited to the situation. But how does that happen?

A case in point

Remember Rule Two! Bringdexterity to your content. Here’s a business case to explain.

A global enterprise manages ahuge portfolio of properties – many are world-class officebuildings and office parks with some unique office campuses. Thecorporation’s business is predominantly three channels –brokerage (leasing space), real estate sales (selling the buildingsor complexes), and property management (caring for and maintainingfacilities).

A particular population withcritical content requirements is the operating engineers, whosupervise and oversee the property maintenance from landscaping towaste management and from HVAC to elevators. Any one engineer mayhave responsibility for five or more properties. The professionalshave a dependency on facility maps, diagrams, equipment and systemmanuals or schematics, details on electrical and plumbing, and alsolayouts of the physical facilities and floor plans. In addition,there are regulatory and compliance management requirements tosatisfy: fire and public safety, traffic management, and governmentbuilding codes.

The leading obstacle historicallywas Internet access through a computer to information sources in thecorporation. Too often engineers experienced firewall blockage andpoor connectivity. With mobile technology – smartphones and tablets– the corporation undertook a process of content transformation.The effort took seven months to complete.

Today, these engineers carry outtheir jobs without barriers to connectivity and are using contentbased on geo-location and situation. Two selections from their deviceproduce all appropriate and available content – physical propertycoordinates and purpose at the location. Users turn on the GPS andselect the action for being at the location. In addition, theregulatory and compliance system, supported by the corporate LMS,provides access to that information, manages updates and alerts, andorchestrates managing the engineer’s compliance certification. Aninvestment of $1.9 million annually improves job performance by ameasurable 30%, which translates into almost $4 million in recurringsavings. This is bottom line net new dollars for the business.

This is a classic example of thepromise for the just in time, anytime, and anywhere use of mobiletechnology. It’s not training and development, although it can be;but, it is about knowledge acquisition when you need it.

There are professionals adept atthe approach to creating a system for intelligent content. There area number of resources for exploring more about the topic. Here arethe benefits that I recognize. The engineering …

• Provides effective content management automation and processing sophistication;

• Increases content value rapidly, as it improves throughput efficiency;

• Creates a product far easier to use, support, and maintain;

• Incorporates meta-tagging for search and discovery;

• Optimizes content structuring for multi-modality use, reuse, and repurposing;

• Permits single-source publishing for multi-channel distribution;

• Creates content with device-specific sensitivity; and

• Produces content with contextual awareness.

Know your content consumer

The second direction is anexploration of the content consumer. These folks are the “learners,”among other consumer roles. To start us on this exploration I’llbegin with a quotation from New Social Learning, by TonyBingham and Marcia Conner: “Learning is what makes us more vibrantparticipants in a world seeking fresh perspectives, novel insights,and first-hand experiences. When shared, what we have learned mixeswith what others have learned, then ripples out, transformingorganizations…”

The point is that learninghappens, and we need to do nothing. Remember Rule One: you are nolonger in the business of learning content development and delivery.So, what are you?

Digitaldisruption is not solely about cultural, business, or social impact.It gets very personal. In the case of content development, and mostspecifically instructional design, the disruption is introducingchanges that require realignment of how you consider your job.Processes remain important, but processing is now about contentingestion, aggregation, cataloging, indexing, orchestration,curation, transformation, and transmission.

Content iscoming from sources inside and outside the organization. Often thecontent is outside your control and is the product of processes thatare very different from the well-formed and structured methods of theISD world. Your importance to the organization could be how well youcontend with the exponential expansion of content. Are you going torule content? Or, is content going to ruin you?

Your role isgoing to require the production of content with delivery through theformal and informal channels of interaction that have the greatestappeal to the organization’s consumer world – lifestyleand workstyle, not the methods of formalized learningtechnology. Success will require an ability to facilitate anorganizational-specific model with variable options for contentaccess and use, including end-user abilities for authoring,publishing, and distributing content. You are going to need provisionfor managing the content generation from virtual communities, socialnetworks, and exchanges outside organizational control (Facebook,LinkedIn, Twitter, industry blogs, and ad hoc media sources).

You aregoing to continue formal learning with added features for sociallearning and personalization of learner use. Your world has to offerconvenience and efficiency in a secure environment where you candevelop sharing with content consumers, along with levels ofgovernance and control to protect the integrity of your organizationand its content.

What’s it all mean for our work?

This lastsentence introduces my final say about the content consumer.Self-expression is the new online entertainment. People don’t wantto just be consumers of content. They want to be participants increating content.

It’s animpulse that means your biggest new role and responsibility isharnessing and cultivating the content inputs and their uses. Youbecome the “content curator,” choosing how content sources makeinputs, how the inputs of content mix and move into some cohesivecollection of knowledge assets.

And considerthis: by 2015, we can expect that 90% of content production posted onthe Internet will be some video format. And, blogs are going toproduce more audio conversation than text. What will be yourmethodology for monitoring, capturing, curating, and cataloging theserich content media? How do you know that those new assets don’tjust pile up like so much of the content stored by our organizations?Most content is not recyclable. It is collecting in digital dumps ofstuff that we cannot find, access, or use.

I had aconversation today with an innovative thinker about the future oflearning. We were kicking around how to reasonably manageunstructured content. He pointed out that my intention is to turn itinto some structured form with catalog structures, indexes, and tags.He is thinking that we’ll evolve new algorithms that sniff out thevalue and believes it is human uses that decide what is worthwhileshowing up in a search in some usable form or not. While he and Iwrestle with the future, I leave you with the following.

Better content is betterbusiness. And, if the content has the expressed purpose of advancingknowledge acquisition, it should be intelligent content in order toproduce the greatest learning value. It’s now your job to take careof it.

References

Bingham, T. and Conner, M. (2010)New Social Learning – A Guide to Transforming Organizationsthrough Social Media. American Society for Training andDevelopment. p. 20.

Gollner,Joe. “The Business of Intelligent Content,” January 31, 2011,FractalEnterprise .https://www.gollner.ca.

Lombardo, M. and Eichinger R.(2001) The Career Architect Planner, 3^rdEdition, Princeton University Press.

Kranz, Garry. “eLearning Hitsits Stride, ”Workforce Magazine Online, February, 2011.

Woodill, Gary. The MobileLearning Edge (2011) The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. p. 66.