Surprisingly there is such a thing as “too much content”. While the adage of “content is king” still stands, organisations in the learning and development sphere are understanding that people are starting to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content available and as a result, cannot find relevant content to use for learning purposes.
This is where content curation really shines. Organisations with a razor-sharp focus on the frontier of learning and development are starting to adopt content curation in their L+D strategies. The benefits speak for themselves:
- Content curation saves the user the time and hassle to wade through a ton of irrelevant content.
- Content curation saves the developer time in order to deploy updated information rapidly. Curation also ensures there are very little costs associated to the deployment of new learning material
- The learning journey becomes a lot smoother and learners are more motivated to learn.
- Learners can take the lead in terms of indicating which content works and what doesn’t which helps organisations weed out the irrelevant content.
- You can turn an e-learning course into a content management system for ease of use.
- You’re able to provide a resource page with relevant links to content in the system, again making it easy to use and reference.
- E-learning platforms allow an environment that can evolve with the learners and the organisational needs.
Content curation may seem like a way to merely sweep-up and post various content from around the web, but it’s far more than that. Rather, it’s an effective way for mining information that makes relevant data readily available to learners. In other words, content curation is the approach taken by organisations to identify the best information by providing context and order to it.
Curating content is one thing, but good content curation is an art. Some necessary steps that need to be taken include:
- Aggregation: searching and collecting info from multiple sources.
- Filtering: sifting through data to focus on the most relevant info that will serve the needs of the learner.
- Organising: chunking content into logical structures.
- Contextualisation: enhancing the content with comments, tags, overviews, additional info.
- Sharing: sharing with the right group of learners according to their training needs.
- Storing and archiving: storing and archiving for ease of reference, consistency in tags and labels, etc.
- Receiving feedback: continuous feedback from learners will further enhance the learning experience and help content curation to really shine.
Summit is already addressing content curation via their learner experience platform – Summit Fuse LXP. The e-learning platform not only hosts excellent training for learners, but also allows for the uploading and editing of content for and by organisations who have access to the platform. Summit has the sole license rights in Africa for this specific e-learning platform.
Contact the team at Summit about the LXP that has already helped other companies to propel their training strategies by making the digital leap.