MakingBetter

Strategy. Ecosystems. Meaning.

Content Strategy

xAPI Camp Preview: dominKnow ONE

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On March 26, 2019, I’m gathering best examples of the tools that enable, and the professionals who define xAPI’s best practices at xAPI Camp (number 14!) hosted by the eLearning Guild at the Learning Solutions conference in Orlando, FL. In the run-up to the event, I’m highlighting these industry colleagues, and why I think they’re enabling and defining best practices. Today’s post focuses on what dominKnow is doing for savvy instructional designers with their ONE platform, with different authoring modes for different types of content authoring.

If you have some questions about the learner, the learning experience or the efficacy of the learning program, there’s some impressive flexibility in dominKnow ONE I want to point out.

About that Competency Dashboard in RISC…

In my last post, I shared a competency reporting dashboard in RISC’s VTA. RISC’s dashboard (like many useful dashboards) relies on specific, well-formed data. Two companies offer such flexibility to customize what and how you track learners engaging with their authoring tools: Trivantis and dominKnow.

For, seriously, a little extra effort, generating custom statements that conform with profiles or just follow best practices offers so many more valuable insights. In what’s been demonstrated previously, much of the workflow to track to competencies or learning objectives is even automated, meaning as a content author, you wouldn’t have to “code” so much as keep content organized… which you’d want to do anyway as just good instructional design. dominKnow ONE by default, and with no programming, provides a hierarchy and tracking of Course > Module > Learning Object, in which the “Learning Object” contains the content and interactions that, together, would support meeting a particular learning objective or competency. When a learner satisfies the requirements to complete the learning object, the dashboard will show that learner has met the competency requirement(s).

Taking it to the next level and optimizing an individual’s learning

You probably already know that xAPI allows us to track all sorts of information, including the aforementioned objectives/competencies. The data can be leveraged by content, though — a capability that many rapid authoring tools just don’t leverage. At next week’s xAPI Camp at Learning Solutions, dominKnow will demonstrate how you can track author-defined competencies in your content and then use the xAPI data you tracked to dynamically personalize the learner’s content. If a learner has already demonstrated/completed a given competency, why should they be forced to re-demonstrate it or an author need to create unique learning content for each user use case? Not only is it cool — it’s interoperable and dominKnow will demonstrate that while doing this requires instructional design skills, no coding skills are required.

Why is this good?

Out of the box, dominKnow is making it easy to organize content without locking you into this default way of organizing your content, leveraging that to personalize your learning, and enabling you to more easily tie it to your company’s objectives. That’s exactly the flexibility and ease I want to track and report out with xAPI. For most content I need to work with, the 1:1 Learning Object:Competency Objective relationship works, but if I have something more complex, I can take dominKnow ONE down the rabbit hole. As much of xAPI’s best practices require tinkering, the more flexible tools I have available to me, the more use I have for them.

Getting Started with Content Strategy

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Content Wrangling Workflow, like a periodic table of content strategy activities.
Content Wrangling Workflow, like a periodic table of content strategy activities.

Last week, Megan & I were at DevLearn in Las Vegas. We intend to post a bit more about it because, for anyone following the Experience API (and us) it was a pretty incredible showcase of what’s happening with adoption that goes far beyond vendors checking the box and putting an LRS in their LMS.

We were happy to host the xAPI in Practice track as well as the xAPI Hyperdrive competition (more on those in other posts). We presented a session on content strategy called Content Wrangling: Applying Content Strategy & Information Architecture. The last few months have been incredibly busy for us (YAYCAKE, to borrow from Trish Uhl) and while there’s been pretty much no activity on our site or blog, we’ve been busy working with vendors and organizations on a variety of projects about which we’re only starting to be able to show and tell. 🙂

Since Megan presented on content strategy in January, we’ve learned a whole lot with more opportunities to put our ideas into practice. A few organizations we’re working with who are getting started with strategically using the Experience API are trying to move from pushing assigned courses to enabling employees to pull content at the moment of need. When your organization is sitting on years and years of eLearning content, there’s a lot to sift through and make sense of.

In July, I presented to the NextGen LMS conference on Continuous Improvement — specifically about the idea of workflows vs. processes. Content Strategy, in our opinion, is a set of workflows — one for baselining and initiating your content strategy from wherever you are now; the other to continuously improve both content and delivery.

Getting through the first workflow, no bones about it, is a tough slog. A content audit isn’t fun but it’s absolutely necessary — but that might be the toughest and slowest part of the workflow. There are other activities that are both meaningful and, if both head and heart are in it, kinda fun (in a librarian sense of fun). Once it’s baselined, if you’re following our lead here, you’re doing continuous improvement the way we practice it with MakingBetter: “LEAN Learning.”

We’re still testing a hypothesis Megan and I had in the creation of the Experience API. We’re finding that the key to understanding xAPI is in figuring out what one needs as a designer to design better, asking that question, and then testing for it in what people do inside the learning (with xAPI) and what they do in work (business result). That applies to content as much as anything else about the learning experience that can be designed. Questions like “How can we make navigation better?” “How can we make searching faster?” “How can we make this content just the right size?” are things we can test for.

Once you start testing the links between what one does with the content and what business results you look to correlate with that experience, you’re practicing hypothesis-based design. This helps us as designers, as leaders and (frankly) as vendors produce better content and better delivery mechanisms for it.

Please enjoy the slides and, if you would, let us know how we can make them better? 🙂

The Future of Learning Content Strategy (Presentation from #ASTDTK14)

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So, we went to Vegas. Aaron completed another year of his life, but claimed it was a “victory lap on his 30s.” Now I’m wondering if every year going forward will just be considered another victory lap on his 30s… until he starts doing victory laps on his 40s? I’m going to need more pop rock chocolate for this.

My panels on Games and Tin Can (xAPI) were good. I love the questions people ask when they’re in an environment that encourages them. In my presentation on content strategy I explored the big change we’re experiencing in shifting to a more agile, responsive world. We can put content anywhere, but how do we keep it fresh, figure out what’s working and make sure all of the things we need to cover are being covered? My slides are awesome (because of Bansky) but not because they really explain anything without me talking over them. So, they’re below if you want, but my session was recorded. I will be sure to share that as soon as I get word it’s available. Really, though, you should just ask. I like questions.

More importantly, I offered this content audit template to everyone to run with and do as they please. You should go play and make it your own: bit.ly/thatspreadsheet

Why Learning Content Strategy?

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Learning content strategy prepares an organization for the future by keeping an eye on how we support the people who aren’t working there yet. That may sound amorphous, but many of us spend time attempting to extract tacit knowledge from the people who are in an organization to put in a format that can be shared with people who are coming into the organization. Just that process to extract and record is hard enough, now we have the challenge of abundance: technology that can help to distribute that knowledge to surface just the right pieces at the right times to a newer person who is struggling; technology to allow people to share information, ask questions and work together.

Banksy.co.uk

We know what Learning Management Systems do, but now we have tools that are social, community generated, adaptive, mobile performance support applications, and beyond. There’s no sign that the niche tool market is slowing down; rather, there are a lot of signs that using these tools well is hugely beneficial. That said, all of these emerging tools need content and how that content behaves and is supported is a paradigm shift from the LMS-only world.

When people talk about content strategy, typically they’re discussing it in terms of marketing. Such people research questions like… “Who is the audience?” “How does the company want them to spend their money or attention?” “How can the content be more usable?” “How can it more fully reflect the brand?”

While these aren’t all applicable to our challenge in helping people to learn and succeed in their work, there are many similarities. As we move away from a world where all of the content just gets put into an LMS without a second thought, we have a new set of questions. We’re not beholden to the restrictive standards that have ruled the LMS world. We’re not even just talking about formal content, because informal needs to recognized and supported. Content doesn’t have to be in one form and it doesn’t have to be saddled with communicating all of the data about a person’s interactions with it. So, “What form should the content take?” “What should be done with the existing, massive course library?” are new questions people in learning and performance must ask themselves.

Having done content strategy and analytics work on typical web sites, there a number of modifications I made to the typical content strategy process to make it more useful for learning. From my work on Tin Can API, my modifications have been informed by how the new standards will work. In a Tin Can world, the content should be wherever it needs to be. The content needs to conform to web standards, be accessible, be sensible in applications that are designed responsively, and be available to many different systems. The technology needs to take on the burden of communicating interaction data.

Working at Knewton, I’ve seen this in action. I’ve learned about the practices giant publishers use to manage their content. Most interestingly, they are the best at separating content from technology in a pure way. They have a CMS, filled with granular pieces of content. The content is well tagged and formed. When it’s dropped into a learning application, any one of many each publisher owns, the application knows exactly what it has and how to communicate data about interactions.

How do such applications know what content it has and what to share about it? Next week, I’ll be at ASTD TechKnowledge 2014 in Las Vegas. In my session on Thursday (1/23) at 3:15, together, we’ll dig through the details of a long-needed approach to learning content strategy. I’ll explain the typical web content strategy process and offer explanation as well as tools to support the future in learning content strategy. This session won’t present a final answer; rather, it’s the beginning of us all asking a new set of questions that will lead to making bigger, better changes in our organizations.

Remote Post: Preparing for Adaptive Learning

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I recently wrote a post for ASTD’s Learning Technologies blog about how to prepare for adaptive learning technology. Really, though, it’s about activities that any learning organization should undertake, whether or not the goal is to implement adaptive technology. There are a lot of different ways that a technology could adapt to people working inside an organization, though it’s not for everything. Adaptive learning shouldn’t replace social, nor mentoring, nor searchable libraries. Research is key to figuring out the best way to make use of technologies that can adapt. The post discusses three steps that will get an organization closer to being ready — including (surprise) research, content, and assessment strategy.

Read more here.