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.

The need for Content Governance

The OutCons team has worked with several clients globally and one thing many of them struggle with is content governance.  I personally have worked with clients ranging from 100 employees up to 100,000 and while the smaller companies have less of a problem, all of them have a need to streamline and enforce a content governance policy. 

Where most companies have issues with their content governance is at the beginning of the process.  Your role in the company creates a bias on how what you think is the best delivery method and that ultimately impacts the governance process and how well the message is received and consumed.  If you are in a Corporate University or Education function, you will most likely determine that you need a full blown eLearning course with a didactic structure including knowledge checks and smile sheets (surveys) to help you gather your feedback.  You may go through all of this when really, just an email and a call to action is necessary to deliver the message and elicit the correct response. 

Where content governance and a content governance process can help is at the beginning of the process and through the review cycles. It can help identify a significant amount of redundant messages or content and can help alleviate the user from having to wade through a sea of content that may or may not be important to the company or to them. 

Within the eLearning industry, companies worldwide face issues managing their content within their Learning Management System (LMS).  They may face differences in culture and differences in how people approach learning and training or they may face differences in how they are measured from a business perspective and these policies impact how their content is entered and measured in their LMS.  This inconsistency in governance and management of the metadata can cause significant issues and create a severe lack of efficiency in content management.  One example of this would be a large company with over 75,000 employees was rolling out a new product.  The introduction to this product and the training of the developers, sales people, and support people necessitated the creation and delivery of content to all these various groups.  Each of these groups went forward and created content for their own group rather than working on it together because one group was unaware of what the other group(s) were developing.

For the purpose of argument, let’s say that it costs 40 effort hours to create a 15-minute introduction to product X.  If the average employee makes $35/hour for instructional design, that is a cost of $1,400 per asset created.  In just this one product example, we see that rather than spend $1,400 on one asset, the company spent $19,600 just on the creation of 14 assets that were <5% different from each other.  They did this because they did not have a centralized governance process.  Additionally, this company spent an average of $180 per course on administration (180x14=$2,520).  In total this company spend $22,120 on extra work that was not necessary.  If they were able to collectively work on content, view pipelines of content creation, content availability, and quickly determine where a piece of content is in its life cycle, they would be able to realize a return on the investment in a system and process to help govern their content creation.

OutCons can help you realize this return on investment and can even help you justify the cost to implement a process and potential tools.  We have significant experience in the content governance processes, change management, tool development and deployment, and we can even help with the integration and hosting of your content so that your employees get back to the core business they are focused on rather than worrying about their content or the content governance process. 

Now that we have identified the need, our next discussion will cover how you execute on your governance plan!  Stay tuned to this blog for more info.