About a few months ago I had a conversation with a Colleague of mine that is in charge of creating the training content for her company. She described her Job to me as “reorganizing a library where someone keeps moving the shelves”. Her new hire onboarding content, her compliance training, her product tutorials created by different groups across the company were all all located in different places on the platform she uses for creating and managing her content. The shared drive for her company had last been fully indexed in 2021 and she estimates that about 30% - 40% of the files located there would actually be found if you started searching for something. The rest of the files would be found by chance or not at all. Her comment really stuck with me. She wasn’t complaining about the quality of her content or saying that she needed more of it. What she meant was that the way she was accessing the content she had was broken.
This story has stuck with me for a number of reasons, not least because it identifies a problem that I sense is widespread in organizations, but for which I rarely see people articulate the issue. In essence, the platform should be subordinate to the work of the team, not the reverse.
Authoring that doesn't require a manual to use the manual
The most painful part for authors of the content in the learning platform is the experience of the authoring environment itself. For instance, although MadCap Flare is a full-featured authoring environment that can support complex structures, the three hours of work required to write one short piece of content far exceeds the value that that piece of content could bring to the organization. A platform that supports such an experience defeats the very purpose of the learning platform.
A good platform for creating learning content removes complexity at the point of creation but supports very detailed and structured use by those who need it. For example, the authoring tool in MadCap Create has been designed specifically to allow Subject Matter Experts to create learning content of a technical or structured nature even where the author has no prior experience of content creation.
The real friction usually lives elsewhere
As far as friction in learning content platforms go, I believe the greatest amount of friction occurs during the handoff of finished learning content. This can be to hand off a finished piece of learning content, to have a subject matter expert write learning content and hand it off to a writer, to have a small team of people write a module of learning content and hand it off to another person for approval, to have a reviewer of learning content hand it off to a writer for updates, to have a content update in a single course of learning content be propagated to all related other courses of learning content. In summary, the biggest amount of friction in learning content platforms is how a change in a single piece of learning content is updated in all places that learning content appears.
A good learning content platform will handle the handoff for you and make it easy for a reviewer of learning content to provide feedback on a learning module. The same for updates to learning content - an update to a piece of learning content in one course should automatically update the related learning content in other courses. And if you have a five person content team and they are spread across different tools, trying to get them to work together to author learning content is like trying to lead an orchestra where half the musicians are playing from different rooms. Even if they are playing the same song, it won’t sound right if they can’t hear each other.
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What "easier" actually looks like in practice
There are certain practices or patterns that surface when a team is able to effectively use a platform to produce learning content. These do not form the basis of a how-to or checklist to assist with selecting a Learning Content Platform but instead serve to highlight practices that are surface to function effectively when using a platform to support the work of the team.
- Single-source content reuse: Write something once, deploy it across multiple contexts. When it changes, it changes everywhere simultaneously. This alone eliminates an entire category of error that plagues content-heavy teams.
- Structured review workflows: Comments tied to specific content, with clear ownership and resolution paths. Not a PDF with sticky notes emailed back and forth, please.
- Role-based access that doesn't require a sysadmin to configure: Subject matter experts should be able to contribute without accidentally seeing, or breaking, every lever and dial in the backend.
- Version history that's actually legible: Not just "last modified by J. Chen at 4:47pm," but a coherent record of what changed, when, and ideally why.
My point was to enumerate some basic ways that we “make it easier” to work with learning content, and then to say that depending on the authoring team, some tools will be easier to use than others to support the same basic ways of working.
Where team size changes the calculus
While authoring content is typically the main focus of any Learning Content Platform, the nature of how a team works together to author content can vary dramatically from one team to another. A solo instructional designer writing a number of instructional modules for a single course would have a very different set of requirements than a 12 person documentation team with multiple writers and subject matter experts authoring content for a variety of related learning objects.
|
Team size |
Main priority |
Common frustration |
|
1-2 people |
Speed and simplicity |
Overly complex tools engineered for enterprise scale |
|
3-8 people |
Collaboration without chaos |
No clear ownership model, version conflicts accumulating quietly |
|
9+ people |
Governance and consistency |
Content drift, formatting inconsistencies multiplying across authors |
With small teams, you run into issues with working within an enterprise’s permissions structure, and with large teams of writers, you run into issues scaling on a platform that was built for the individual creator.
Consistency is harder than you think!
Finally, there is the problem of style (so called because it typically manifests slowly over time) for teams that use large amounts of learning content to onboard and train employees, and also to manage and track compliance in various ways. This style problem affects a number of different factors, including the look and feel of a piece of learning content, the terms that are used in it, and the format. As a general rule, learning content that is written to support onboarding will be very different from that written to support compliance. Indeed, within an organization’s learning content “library” there may be several different styles used for different pieces of content. When such content is not managed so as to create and maintain a single style, the content can easily become inconsistent with each other, and in some cases, even contradictory.
By enforcing style, approved terms, and the proper formatting of content for use in a variety of channels, these tools can help to reduce the amount of operational overhead placed on creators. Style, approved terms, and formatting are all key to these goals. As I mentioned above, creators typically underestimate the amount of time required to achieve these goals, and the amount of time that will be ‘wasted’ as a result of not achieving them. This lost time is not glamorous, often not visible, but real. It is the difference between a trusted content library that is used, and a content library that is not trusted and is not used. (Again, I am not saying that all lost time here is avoidable. Some will always exist. But much of it can be avoided by choosing the right tool from the start).
The question teams actually need to ask
Before you start looking for a learning content platform, look at the handoff scenario above and assess the potential solution’s ability to manage that. The amount of pain the solution will add to your teams and the amount of pain it will alleviate will be a key factor in whether or not a solution is worth looking at. It’s a scenario that will be common place in your teams’ work. That scenario or variation of it will happen again and again. A solution to this problem will make your teams life easier (or less pain). That solution is what you should be looking for when evaluating platforms for your learning content.
As a result, the platform you choose for learning content will either help manage that scenario (or one similar) that is currently happening on your team, or it will make it worse. In general, there is nothing in between.
And lastly, my colleague always describes a great content tool as a well-organized library. Recently she was at a huge library. The endless shelves of books were organized by author, and then by title. But the best part of the whole experience was that the books on the shelves all looked the same. They all had the same cover. My colleague wandered the aisles of the library for hours. Why? Because the tools of her trade had all disappeared into the background of the library. And that’s the benchmark for content tools. They should all disappear into the background of your work. Your work should be easy. And when it’s easy, you’ll know that you have a great content tool.
