Tip: Content Strategy for Continuous Learning

Content strategy can mean different things to differentpeople even within the same organization, but the reasons for a strategy rarelyvary: to produce good learning content and to maximize ROI from the content-creationeffort. Great content is simply what the learner needs, at the time they needit, and in exactly the right form that helps them achieve their immediate goal.

According to a recent Brandon Hall study, as many as 76 percentof organizations do a moderately effective job of aligning their learning goalswith their performance objectives, while nearly 44 percent do this at a high orvery high level. As we move to an environment that sustains and encouragesongoing learning to drive performance, our content is getting smaller but thereis more of it, making it a challenge to manage. Some might say it is borderingon “out of control” as we manage content for multiple audiences, forms, momentsof need, and target devices. Content strategy and management go hand-in-hand,and some common-sense principles will help you keep your content under controlwhile executing a sustainable content strategy that will carry you for manyyears.

The elements of a content strategy

Content strategists ask and answer these questions bywriting simple user stories for each audience (Figure 1):

Figure 1: The three elements of a content strategy

1. Audience (User): Who will consume the content (customers,prospects, partners, employees)? Whydo they need it (what goal will it help them achieve)?
2. Content: What do they need to know?
3. Context: When and Where do theyneed to know it (in a class, at their desk, on the road, in a factory?)

How do they think of the content?How will they search for it? What mental models are used to organize it—like acompetency matrix, career path, or a physical or virtual machine? How does thiscontent relate to other existing or future content?

Content as a strategy

“Content as a Strategy,” or single-sourcing yourlearning content, is a winning approach in many organizations today as theyshift to performance-driven learning. The benefits include bite-sized learningcontent available to multiple audiences in many formats, better alignment tothe business, higher productivity, faster time-to-market, and best of all—highlyeffective content. The reason these organizations know that their contentis working is that they can measure it at the granular level, unliketraditional eLearning or monolithic training courses.

What do we mean by Content as a Strategy? By treating eachindividual piece of content as a reusable object, every piece of content youcreate has purpose, can stand alone or be integrated with other content, can bepresented in different ways on any device, can be maintained, and can bemeasured for effectiveness. This is achieved because the actual content isseparated from the presentation.

A simple content model

When producing content in this way, it helps to follow asimple content model. The components of the model typically include:

Educational Objective:What will be accomplished by experiencing this content? By stating theeducational objective for each piece of content, you can match it to learnersin a given context more easily and dynamically.

Substance: Thisis the actual content itself in the form of text, images, figures, lists,videos, simulations, activities, etc.

Knowledge Assessment:This is the set of questions or actions the learner can take to prove that theyhave obtained the knowledge and met the educational objective.

Structure: Thisis the additional information about the content that answers the questionsabout audience, categorization, playability, searchability, reuse, and context.

Content granularity

So what is a learning object (or “nugget,” as some like tocall it)? It is bigger than a paragraph but smaller than a course. Experts in single-sourceauthoring, like Bryan Chapman of the Chapman Alliance, suggest that if you are usedto structuring courses in a course/lesson/topic hierarchy, the typical topic contentwould represent the lowest level in your object architecture. Media objects,such as images, videos, and figures are shareable objects that you can applyinside a topic, but they are always linked to a single instance of that objectin a given language for ease of maintenance and maximum reuse.

Content management considerations

Workflow and governance, accomplished through acollaborative authoring environment, make it possible to manage your content asa strategy (Figure 2). Desktop-authoring environments with shared file spacesdo not offer content strategists, subject matter experts, and authors the toolsrequired for planning, writing, building, assembling, translating, delivering,and iterating content in an Agile process. Nor do they guarantee that upondelivery, the learner is experiencing the most current version of the contentfrom any system or device.

Figure 2: Workflow and governance make it possible to managecontent as a strategy

A content management system, designed specifically forlearning, provides role-based permissions, workflow, and notifications to movecontent through author, publish, deliver, and measure phases. In addition, itcan produce standards-compliant content (HTML5, SCORM, AICC, and EPUB) forinteroperability with other systems like your LMS, web portal, mobile apps, etc.Content users receive the content in the appropriate context and experience thefull impact as intended by the content strategist. Feedback is provided to thecontent developers at the granular level, letting them maintain and improvecontent at the speed that the business demands.

Reference

Grebow, David. TheState of Learning and Development 2014: Coming of Age. Brandon Hall Group. https://go.brandonhall.com/state_of_learning_and_development_ES

(See Xyleme in Booth 509 at DevLearn for more informationabout content as a strategy and content management.)