Content Hosting Primer
One of the questions I have been asking for years is ‘where
is your content’. When I first started
working with Learning Management and eLearning in general, the term ‘cloud’
wasn’t a marketing trend yet. Clients,
customers, and even the companies I have worked for put their eLearning content
wherever they could but generally behind a corporate firewall along with their
Learning Management System (LMS). One
client I had was a commercial client that sold content – since my company
hosted their LMS, we also hosted their content on the same servers. Very easy setups!
Today it’s different.
Users are not just behind your firewall.
They are out in the world accessing the content from their phones
without noticing any difference in quality of throughput or security
restrictions. This is a fantastic step
forward and gets us all closer to performance driven content delivery where the
information is given to us right at the moment we need it. But getting closer
to this nirvana is a hard thing to do technically and as it turns out sometimes
it is a very hard thing politically and socially within companies.
Content hosting is a relatively easy thing to do. You procure a cloud environment, upload some
content, plop the URL into your LMS and run….right? It can potentially be that easy. There is work to be done and technical tasks
that need to be completed, but none of them are beyond an experienced person’s
ability.
There are a few questions to ask yourself next time you’re
considering reviewing where your content is hosted (internally or
externally). Some of them include:
Where is your
audience? This is the primary in
driver in your content development and should also be a primary driver in how
you host your content. Does your
audience need access outside of the network?
If so, how will you ensure security and reliability in the connection?
Who is paying for them to consume the content (who pays for wifi, data plans,
etc)?
What technology is
your content? This is not a call to debate the best technology, but once
that determination is made, the hosting and consumption vehicles must be able
to support whatever is chosen. You may
determine that you don’t even need mobile enabled content and this can be an
easy question. The point is that someone
has to make the determination before you spend a significant amount of time, money,
and resources on a piece of content that may not work on your intended
audiences’ device.
How do you want to
report on consumption? This could be a little controversial within your
company. Are you launching LMS courses
that communicate completion back to the LMS?
Are you just launching videos that may or may not reside in some other
system and you just want to track the launching? There are a lot of different options depending
upon the business need for the content.
An experienced content hosting team can help coordinate
along with your eLearning producer to make sure your content is delivered
flawlessly. After you have made the
decision to host (internally or externally) there are steps to help get your
company through the technical snags that will happen. In the next few posts we will further explore
hosting and how you can effectively host content for all of your users.
