6 types of learning content

I have long argued that L&D spends too much of its time in content creation (see: Escaping the Content Treadmill). This is not to say that content isn’t useful, but rather that usually someone else has probably already created it.

(What follows is an extract from my book Learning Technologies in the Workplace, available from 3 May 2017. Use code FHRLTW20 to buy with a 20% discount.)

Thinking about learning content in this way led me some years ago to the idea of the ‘learning content pyramid’, which drew on a 2008 blog by Clive Shepherd (itself based on conversations with Nick Shackleton-Jones and others) that suggested a three-layer pyramid of content. My version of the learning content pyramid has six layers:

The arrow on the left indicates that contextual relevance increases higher up the pyramid. The arrow on the right emphasizes the shape of the pyramid, indicating that there is more material available at the bottom than at the top. Usually, although not always, the production values increase as you go further up the pyramid.

From the bottom of the pyramid, the six layers are:

Freely available content

This is content available for free, usually via the internet. For L&D professionals the trick is to build this into organizational learning in a helpful way rather than simply pointing people at a vast array of unfiltered resources. This has been happening for some time. In 2013 in the UK, Virgin Media incorporated content from free language-learning site Duolingo into their corporate LMS. Other organizations do this with free content from iTunes U and YouTube, with TED talks proving especially popular. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from suppliers such as Coursera, Udemy and FutureLearn also fall into this layer of the pyramid.

Some content available for free on the internet is of very average production value. Some is exceptionally high – as with Duolingo’s courses and BBC content. We should not confuse the quality of production with the quality of learning it will support, however. It is possible to create wonderful-looking courses, performance support tools and other assets which, despite their aesthetic appeal, do not help people learn well. And it is quite possible for an unexciting asset to have a tremendous impact on learning and/or performance.

 Generic content 

There is a global market for generic online learning materials. This is content – usually courses – that can be used in a wide variety of situations. A unit on how to create a pie chart in Excel, for example, has a broad application, regardless of what size or type of organization it is used in. Supply of this generic content is dominated by Skillsoft, a global content company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, which not only owns a considerable, wide-ranging catalogue of material, but also a content delivery platform and an LMS. In addition, smaller companies like Video Arts continue to successfully produce high-quality generic management training materials.

Any large organization is likely at some point to have bought libraries of courses on topics such as Microsoft Excel and Word, as well as generic soft skills courses such as that perennial favourite ‘handling a performance review’.

Generic courses will not put the content in the employee’s exact context. Sometimes they may not meet the particular standards of production that the L&D or marketing departments would like, but the question to be asked here is simple: do these materials do the job well enough? If they do, then the L&D team’s time can be spent on something more strategic than producing a course.

Curated content sets

There is a lot of material available online, whether free or in catalogues of generic content (which typically run to tens of thousands of courses). So much so, that a time-poor L&D professional can find it difficult to know where to source content and how to organize it for employees. Recognising this, some providers of generic learning content are now providing what can be called ‘curated content sets’. These are collections of content suitable for a particular role, department or territory within an organization. They are more context-specific than content chosen from a catalogue, because they are usually written with a particular job role or sector in mind. A course might, for example, be titled not ‘Creating pivot tables in Excel’ but ‘Pivot tables for sales managers’ or ‘Pivot tables in supply chain management’.

A company can act as a central clearing house for specialist producers of elearning content. This is the role that OpenSesame has adopted. Founded in 2011, the Portland, Oregon company provides the complex infrastructure for publishers to upload content and for enterprises to download them. This can be done either piece meal, or en masse, or as part of a curated content set that an OpenSesame consultant has created following an engagement with the enterprise.

User generated content (UGC)

At work, people naturally create vast amounts of materials which others can learn from, whether it is explicitly designed for learning or not. It could be as generic as the company’s annual report, as transitory as a briefing for the next few days, or as rough as some notes from a meeting.

As well as material created inside the organization, User Generated Content (UGC) includes material created in online social forums, such as the extensive chat created during the Learning and Skills Group webinars or during Twitter chat meetings.

While the content itself is not paid for, UGC is not entirely free, either. There may be no upfront cost for access, as there is with generic content, but it certainly takes time (and sometimes money) to set up and maintain the systems for sharing UGC. And there is more than technology involved here – simply collecting content in one place is not enough. Content that is useful in theory is useless in practice if it cannot be found. To allow it to be found, it needs at the very least a good filing system or search mechanism. It may also need interpretation to put the content in context. Also, it is usual for the value of some UGC to decay over time, at which point it needs to be removed from the collection. It needs curation, and whether that takes time or money or both, is isn’t free.

Internally-created UGC meets the needs of the organization in a way that generic content never can, because it is written in context. The challenge for much UGC is that the context can be too specific. If the author works in marketing, the content might not necessarily apply in finance or operations. If this is the case, then the L&D department may wish to intervene to edit or otherwise augment the content.

Another concern with UGC lies with its accuracy. An L&D department steeped in the tradition of providing all courses used by an organization will find it difficult to let go of the reins and allow the free flow of information between employees. This is a fair point – after all, repairing the damage done by putting bad practice into circulation is far more time consuming than preventing it getting into circulation it the first place. On the other hand, organizations need rapid distribution of information to meet the demands of the modern working world.

The solution is for the L&D department to take a pragmatic approach to balancing the need for speed against the risk of bad practice. How bad is the risk, and how likely is it? Sometimes, ‘good enough’ information that reaches the point of need fast is far better than perfectly accurate information that arrives too late to be of any use. If the severity and likelihood of risk are both low, then L&D can step aside.

On other occasions, there is a need to balance speed with accuracy. When Black & Decker (now Stanley Black & Decker) gave their sales force Flip cameras to record videos for colleagues to view, the videos were not immediately posted onto the Black and Deck platform. They went to the central L&D team, which first checked and tagged before posting them.

Content created internally

Whereas L&D departments were once the main providers of learning content, now internally-created materials have to compete with a vast amount of free or low-cost content and UGC. To justify the necessary commitment of resources, any content created internally must relate to the organization in ways that other forms of content cannot.

While it can be beautifully prepared or emotionally engaging, internally-generated content need not be. It need only be context-rich, steeped in the reality of the organization, and useful. It may also be that the content is confidential and unique to the organization, in which case L&D certainly should be involved in managing the content distribution.

When power tool manufacturer TTI wanted to improve efficiency in handling returned goods, it produced a clear, online course covering the 10 most common mistakes in handling returned goods. It was not complex to produce. It did, however, generate $35m in savings for the company over a 2 year period.

Commissioned content

Organizations cannot always produce what they need, which is why there will always be a place for high-quality commissioned content. The subject may require specialist knowledge. The high-profile nature of the work may demand great production values, or specialist techniques. Those specialist techniques may, however, only have a short shelf life, and if there is no rush for the content, it is always worth waiting for the skills to become more widely spread. When the uses of smart phones for accessing content took off in 2013-2014 there was a boom in demand for the services of specialist companies capable of producing suitable content for smart phones. In particular, there was a demand for content that could adapt to different devices, and companies were prepared to pay for the expertise to deliver that. Already, at the time of writing (late 2016) those skills are becoming more common place both across a wider range of vendors and within L&D departments’ own design teams.

Using the pyramid

This pyramid is only one way of considering the content that organizations use for learning, but it is a tool that I have found useful to help people think about their own approach to learning content. It prompts questions such as:

• How high should our productions values be for this content?
• Are we using our internal subject matter experts well enough?
• What free resources could the organization benefit from?
• What is our most important content, and how should it look?
• What sort of content do we need to support a particular task?
• Are we spending too much time creating our own content?

Based on an extract from Learning Technologies in the Workplace, published by Kogan Page on 3 May 2017