I met with an executive from one of the leading LCMS (Learning Content Management System) providers. He said, “clients are not fully utilizing the “C” in the LCMS”. I inquired further why this is the case. It turns out that most of content being produced are “solid blocks” of content. This is where a developer would use, as an example, Captivate or Flash to construct the program in one closed file. Because the program is a “solid block”, there is very little opportunity to reuse or reposition parts of the content in other programs. By designing programs in “solid blocks” the value of the content and its parts to be inputs to other programs are limited.
Here are thoughts to consider:
Plan your instructional design to allow you to divide the programs into smaller portions. Your Flash developer may not like this because it requires a little more work on his part. | |
Divide the parts into granular levels so that each granule can be a free-standing learning lesson that you can reuse somewhere else or in other programs. | |
Publish the granular programs as stand-alone programs. Example: In sales training, you can divide all the steps of the selling process as stand-alone lessons. Prospecting, closing, or probing can be one independent Flash file or video, etc. | |
The benefits are: | |
Allows you flexibility to reuse the lessons as part of other programs. | |
Learners can locate each lesson easily compared to when they have to drill down to the “solid block” to find the content they needed. |
Ray Jimenez, PhD
Vignettes Learning
“Helping Learners Learn Their Way”