Reaching More Students for Less

By Chris Roach and Jim Cain

Our client was a nonprofit organization offering educational programs and certification to professionals in all segments of the property and casualty insurance industry.  They provide print and online learning products that help individuals prepare for their national exams required for certification. They engaged Jacquette Consulting to help them reduce their time and cost to create educational products by maximizing content reuse, streamlining business processes, and automating the generation of richly designed print publications and online eLearning modules.

In the past, the client’s educational content was driven by the needs of their print publications.  With the addition of online eLearning modules, the content that was produced for print was being duplicated for online.  This duplication of content increased development costs not only for the creation of the online products, but also for print products when content changes discovered in online needed to be duplicated for print.

Jacquette and the client worked together to define a more granular unit for educational content: the learning object, which contains content for a specific educational objective.  Each learning object is authored in a delivery-neutral model according to the client’s instructional design strategies and intended to enhance cognition and promote reuse.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is the basis of this learning object model.  DITA is an XML-based architecture for creating topic-oriented, information-typed content that is easily reused. Jacquette specialized DITA to meet the specific needs of the client’s learning objects.

Efficient Authoring

By moving to a learning object model for their content, the client has enabled writers to focus solely on the instruction necessary to meet each educational objective.  When authoring using this model, writers are more concerned with the instructional design of the content and less concerned with the presentation which is handled later in the process by product presentation teams.

In addition to implementing this learning object model, Jacquette helped the client streamline their content authoring processes through process analysis and the implementation of electronic workflow.  With these changes, the client is able to track and manage the development, review, and approval of all of their learning objects, ensuring that each step that is necessary to prepare a learning object for publication has been completed.

Content Reuse Across Delivery Channels

Product presentation teams assemble learning objects into product maps.  Because each learning object is self-contained, a learning object can be included in any number of product maps, allowing a learning object to be written once and reused in multiple products.

Additionally, learning objects are written in a delivery-neutral manner.  Therefore, content from a learning object is easily used in both print and online products, maximizing the effort that was invested in developing each learning object.

Decreased Time to Publish

A learning object is a collection of educational content that feeds four print products (text books, course guides, review notes, flash cards) and online eLearning modules.  By including learning objects in their print and online product maps, the client is able to automate the generation of all of these products in parallel, decreasing the amount of time needed to produce materials for their students.

Decreased Cost to Publish

Composition and layout of print products is automated, producing richly designed, press-ready publications based upon the client’s existing product templates.  This automated process replaces manual composition and layout activities while providing the ability for any layout issues to be addressed manually if absolutely necessary.

Interactive online eLearning modules are also generated automatically, providing modules that are ready to be plugged into the client learning management system (LMS).  Module navigation, screen interactions, and knowledge checks are built into the generation process.  This allows the creation of the online product maps to be focused solely on where in each module content needs to be displayed.

Summary

With these changes, the client can now provide their students the choice of educational material that is most effective for their learning needs.  At the same time, the client has ensured that the same content is being presented regardless of the delivery channel.  This has broadened the reach of their material while reducing the costs associated with creating educational products. 

Chris Roach is a senior project manager with expertise working in document and content management in a variety of environments, including pharmaceutical and biotech.  Chris is currently helping clients understand the myriad of options available for content management in publishing; and he plays a mean round of golf.

Jim Cain is senior consultant and the leader of the company's DITA/XML practice.  He has thirteen years of experience implementing software solutions in a variety of environments, including an educational implementation using the Beta version of DITA for Learning and Training.  Jim is an active member of the Philadelphia XML User Group.