Source: theHRDIRECTOR
Date: December 2006 

Peter Nicol, VP EMEA for learning and knowledge solutions provider outstart, examines the benefits of enabling content creation at all levels of the organisation.

The benefits of continuous learning within any business environment are undisputable. Organisations spend a great deal of time and exert considerable effort on the implementation of easily accessible, educational programmes for their staff. But the task of creating and delivering content to train and educate staff has come to be viewed by some as a barrier, eating into the time and efforts of those responsible for the process, as well as the finances of the company if it needs to be outsourced. As a result it can be pushed to one side. The advent of e-learning and e-knowledge solutions has certainly relieved much of the administrative burden and diminished many of the time pressures on those staff previously responsible for delivering learning in a classroom environment. However, these solutions still leave organisations with the challenge of creating content to populate these programs.

Learning management systems (LMS), were initially used to leverage existing courses and those available through third party content, such as Microsoft applications training. As such, the return on investment from traditional LMS reduces significantly as the availability of content dries up. What’s more, these generic, untailored courses are of limited value to an organisation as they ignore its unique culture and knowledge requirements.

"E-knowledge solutions should be used to interconnect employees, as well as knowledge sources from outside the organisation, creating an interactive knowledge database which acts as a community to which anyone can contribute"

Bespoke course content is vital to building identity and loyalty among staff. With classroom-based learning, an organisation could rely on the subject matter expert delivering tailor-made training with content specific to employee needs. However, e-learning solutions require content to be pre-authored and this raises the question of who should do this and how? Learning management systems must evolve to address this challenge.

THE CONTENT CREATION CHALLENGE

Within a typical organisation, the creation of learning content can fall under the responsibilities of any number of people, and the process can take a number of forms.

Human resources departments often take the lead in this role, with training classified within the HR function. Heads of department and team leaders may also input as they are closer to those partaking in the training programmes on offer and are deemed to better understand their needs. If the subject matter is particularly specialised, organisations may also employ the skills of an industry expert or specialist – either within the organisation or externally. In addition, external training professionals and consultants may be employed to provide courses and knowledge programs on a variety of topics.

In an ideal world, all of these people would be involved in the generation of every piece of content developed for learning and knowledge sharing, but this is often perceived as too difficult to coordinate and constrained by the busy schedules of senior executives. There is also a perception that in order to involve each of these parties, the organisation is creating a completely new training need, as all those involved in content authoring
must have the necessary skills to produce, approve or manage this content.

"it is vital to find ways to enhance interaction between employees, taking the focus away from formal learning and shifting it towards informal learning"

Many of these concerns derive from the way in which content has traditionally been created in many organisations. Each of the different parties involved may create learning content using any number of different tools – from more basic applications such as Microsoft Word and Powerpoint, to more specialist programming tools such as Authoware and Flash – making the process cumbersome and inefficient in the first instance, and inaccessible to those without prior training in the latter.

CLEVER CONTENT CREATION
In reality, desktop e-learning tools, such as OutStart Trainer or Articulate, allow any user to author learning content without prior expertise in programming. An easy-to-use learning content authoring tool should allow anyone within an organisation to create content quickly and easily so that they can focus on the content itself rather than on the process of creating it. Solutions with drag and drop functionality enable faster time to value, while author efficiency can be increased and duplication eliminated by enabling authors to work collaboratively and share content, graphics, templates, simulations and other training media. What’s more, when these authoring tools are integrated with an effective learning content management system (LCMS), author productivity can be increased further by minimising process re-engineering and by automating the process of content approval to ensure that content is verified by all relevant parties before use.

"Ultimately, the objective of training and learning, and finding effective systems to create and deliver it, should be to encourage continuous professional and personal development for the benefit of both the organisation and its employees"

An effective asset-based1 CMS can also enable an organisation to maximise learning effectiveness by tailoring courses to specific needs, preferences, role and prior knowledge – without the need to re-create content. It is also vital that the LCMS an organisation chooses enables it to update content on an ongoing basis, without having to recreate entire courses.

BUILDING A LEARNING ORGANISATION
Ultimately, the objective of training and learning, and finding effective systems to create and deliver it, should be to encourage continuous professional and personal development for the benefit of both the organisation and its employees. To achieve this, it is critical that learning and content truly reflects the culture that an organisation wishes to instil and creates a sense of brand identity among employees. Deploying effective and reputable content authoring and LCMS solutions, as described above, will go some way towards achieving this by assembling and managing an organisation’s knowledge stores, but will always be limited to a store of approved content rather than reflecting an organisation’s entire knowledge base. To truly infuse a culture of continuous learning within an  organisation, and to ensure that no piece of knowledge is limited to an individual or group of individuals, it is vital to find ways to enhance interaction between employees, taking the focus away from formal learning and shifting it towards informal learning.

Next-generation LCMS systems need to be integrated with e-knowledge solutions, which enable the organic capture of knowledge from all conceivable sources within an organisation, and most importantly enable this to be shared with peers as and when they need it. E-knowledge solutions should be used to interconnect employees, as well as knowledge sources from outside the organisation, creating an interactive knowledge database which acts as a community to which anyone can contribute, but has controls in place to ensure the quality of the information it contains. If the process of contributing to and managing these communities is made intuitive, in the same way that creating learning content can be, then it will achieve the buy-in of all concerned. Ultimately this will enable a culture of continuous, informal learning to be easily instilled in an organisation, without impacting the daily duties of anyone involved.