We all know how it feels coming back to work from a vacation. The shock of downloading hundreds of emails, even with our spam filters on their highest settings. We get that sinking feeling as we scroll through the mail ... will it ever end?
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Managing organizational content such as email has emerged as one of the biggest challenges facing business. In its June 2005 white paper, Enterprise Content Management, Microsoft calculates that 93% of all content is now in electronic form. This includes emails, slides, PDF files, voice, digital fax, and videos.
Content is by nature messy, hard to sort, and more and more difficult to find on our desktops. We all spend time searching for missing files, emails, and content on our computers. What is the burden on worker productivity? Accenture places the cost at three to five percent of a company’s revenue. For small businesses, this can mean the difference between being profitable and breaking even. For a large business, it can mean millions of dollars in lost productivity.
Unfortunately, this is a growing challenge; a recent Yankee Group research report states that enterprise content is projected to increase dramatically each year. E-Content magazine projects the pace of this growth at 60% annually for enterprise companies. But these researchers focus on what is typically described as unstructured content. As trainers, we have the daunting task of turning this unstructured content into structured content.
Creating structured training content
Content is often referred to as “king” by trainers because it is what makes up all training programs. Organizations value training content because the successful application of effective design principals, coupled with effective delivery, often results in highly motivated, competent employees that can impact organizational competitiveness and profits.
Figure 1 Training content comes from many sources.
Gathering content from numerous sources is among the first steps in course design. These sources include a wide range of people, documents, Web pages, and organization research. Figure 1, identifies some common training content sources.
After gathering the course content, it’s time for the difficult and challenging process of sorting, prioritizing, reorganizing, and enriching content in order to create effective training programs. I’ll have more to say about best practices for this process in the second half of this article.
Figure 2 represents the process of gathering, sorting, prioritizing, and enriching content with learning activities and engaging treatment to turn it into training programs. In the gather stage we obtain all topic-relevant content. In the sort phase we organize the content into logical categories and sequence it from start to finish. In the prioritize phase we ask the key question, “What is important?” Based on the results, we cut out the less critical topics and focus on the topics that are most important to achieve the desired outcomes. Last but not least the developer enriches the content by providing learning activities, graphics, and media elements to engage the learner.
Figure 2 Content moves from unstructured information to structured training modules through a four-step process.
The content challenge
Historically, training content has fallen into predictable design, delivery, and update cycles, but today training content is rapidly changing due to business needs and technology. Table 1, below, outlines how the rapid growth in digital content will change training design, development, and deployment over time.
| Factor | Past | Present | Future |
| Design time for a typical course | 4-6 months | 2-3 months | 1-2 months |
| Delivery methodology | Instructor-led | Blended 25% asynchronous | Blended 50% asynchronous |
| Content growth (new pages) | 5% per year | 20-60% per year | 70-100% per year |
| Atrophy of existing content (% of updates) | 5% per year | 25% per year | 35% per year |
| Delivery technology (in order of most frequent) | Instructor-led | Instructor-led, virtual classroom, Web-based | Virtual classroom, Web-based, instructor-led |
| Maintenance cycle | Annual | Semi-annual | Weekly |
| Tools | Electronic publication (Word) and PowerPoint | Programming languages, authoring tools | PowerPoint, conversion software and learning content management systems |
| Collaboration between learners | Classroom discussions | Some threaded discussion, instant messaging | New social technologies such as Wiki and collabora-tion tools |
My colleagues and I had the unique opportunity to serve for three and a half years as the in-house e-Learning development team for one of the nation’s largest financial institutions. We helped develop and publish 90 20-minute product knowledge course learning objects. With the help of a content management system, over a six-month period the institution identified over 6000 updates to these courses. This was after the courses were fully tested, reviewed, and approved for release. That’s 67 changes per 20-minute course or approximately 1.5 changes per page — a testament to the volatility of content and the challenge of maintaining it!
There are a growing number of case studies, presentations, and papers addressing how to create courses faster, cheaper and better. But no matter how fast we create training content, over time the demands of content updates and the rapidity of content growth burdens us. In the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (500 BC), “Nothing endures but change.” Once upon a time, a trainer could update his or her PowerPoint slides with the latest information. But as we move to packaged Web-based training content, it is very challenging to match the speed of content metamorphoses, no matter how fast we are.
