Making The Case For Content

When you’re learning a new job, or just trying to survive day-to-day in a fast-changing environment in which it seems there’s always something new you have to understand or be able to do, then you need support. You could ask your colleague who’s the local expert on the subject at hand, but she’s probably too busy keeping up-to-date herself to react to every cry for help from people like you. Thank goodness your organisation installed a learning content management system. Now you can read all those reports, presentations and briefings that previously were scattered around the organisation. You can even take an e-learning course that’s precisely tailored to what you need to know now. What’s more, your colleague has also written up everything she knows on the subject so you don’t have to bother her with the same routine queries.

Is this a reality? Can one product really combine the benefits of e-learning and knowledge management in one integrated system? Well, maybe. In this chapter, I examine the claims for learning content management systems to help you determine whether the LCMS is an acronym that you need to add to your working dictionary.

So what is an LCMS?

Just when you thought it was safe to go to a training conference again, secure in the knowledge that you could keep up with the latest techno-training-babble, along comes a new concept that sends you crashing back into the beginners’ camp. This time it’s learning content management systems, or LCMSs. You can be excused – the acronym LCMS sounds extremely similar to LMS, but is it the same thing? On the other hand, an LCMS seems to offer many of the capabilities that you associated with knowledge management systems, but are they one and the same? As will become apparent as we explore the capabilities of an LCMS, you can be forgiven for being confused, as there are many overlaps between all of these terms. But don’t let this put you off completely, because underlying the concept of an LCMS are some powerful new ways of looking at how knowledge and learning are managed in an organisation and, one way or another, these will find themselves on your agenda time and again in years to come.

Perhaps one of the best ways of understanding what an LCMS is, is by looking at what it is not. An LCMS is not a way of serving up a catalogue of ready-built and shrink-wrapped course offerings to learners. If you want to manage the provision of courses – online, instructor-led or whatever – throughout your organisation, get a learning management system, an LMS. What an LCMS allows you to do is create and assemble a library of digital content that can then be applied flexibly to suit a variety of needs – self-study e-learning courses perhaps, but also electronic performance support materials, components in virtual classroom sessions, even handouts for face-to-face events.

How about the formal definitions? Jay Cross, writing in InternetTime.com, defines an LCMS as: “A multi-user environment where learning developers can create, store, reuse, manage, and deliver digital learning content from a central object repository.” Research Company IDC similarly defines an LCMS as a system “that is used to create, store, assemble, and deliver personalised e-learning content in the form of learning objects.”

“Aha”, you say, “so an LCMS is a new-fangled authoring system, one that helps you to build learning objects rather than complete courses.” You’re on the right track, but there’s more to it than that. An LCMS draws on many of the principles of knowledge management, in that it facilitates the capture and storage of unstructured information as well as carefully-crafted training materials; the sort of information that resides on every desktop and in every employee’s head. By breaking down the artificial distinctions between information, knowledge and learning, the learner benefits – they get access to what they need from one source.

An LCMS makes it easier to meet the needs for informal, unstructured learning.

Leading LMS supplier Docent Inc., recognised this convergence when, in 2001, they acquired the LCMS vendor gForce. Docent already had tools for creating and managing formal, structured learning, but they realised that the need was equally as strong for the rapid deployment of content with a short shelf-life, that would be used on a just-in-time basis. To achieve this required a tool that would allow anyone in the organisation to rapidly create content, often using existing documents, presentations and other resources. gForce includes a number of content creation tools, including gForceAuthor, which allows subject experts to build media-rich content from standard packages such as PowerPoint and DreamWeaver. According to Docent: “gForce empowers individuals with tools they already know, rather than having them become instructional designers. This perfectly complements Docent's existing solution for the management and delivery of structured learning content.”

Docent is not the only LMS vendor to see the danger that they could be perceived as peddling old technology based on ‘traditional’ learning methods (now they know how classroom trainers feel when their methods are called traditional). Rather than see a battle of paradigms – the course versus the personalised learning path – they’ve simply bought up the LCMS vendors and built content management functionality into their own offerings. Some more examples? Saba acquire Ultris and brand it Saba Content; KnowledgePlanet take on Peer3 to create KnowledgePlanet Content; Click2Learn purchase Intelliprep in order to create Aspen Learning Experience Server; Centra acquire MindLever and re-brand it Centra Knowledge Center. Got the idea?

Content vendors are also well aware of the benefits of structuring their content as reusable learning objects and supporting personalised learning paths. The MySmartForce platform (now re-branded since the merger with SkillSoft) allows customers to mix and match their own content, produced externally to the system, with the wide range of standard SmartForce objects, to build highly customised solutions. Does this make MySmartForce an LCMS? Certainly not, but to the extent that SmartForce content forms the basis of your strategy, you will enjoy many of the same benefits.