I recently had a chat with David Wentworth at Brandon Hall Group about a common place so many people in the L&D industry find themselves. They’re inundated with more learning tools than they can manage, content more varied than they imagined, and more data than they know what to do with.

During the webinar on “Unifying content and data in complex learning ecosystems”, David shared the data Brandon Hall Group has collected in their recent Learner Experience Survey. The takeaway? That anecdotal data about the increasing complexities of eLearning systems in the enterprise isn’t just in our imaginations—it’s become everyone’s reality. Across our audience, we found that 45% had 5 or more learning applications in their ecosystems and David’s data shows the same kind of complexity explosion across both content and data.

The good news is that we love talking to folks about these kinds of problems. We’ve been able to help customers use new learning standards without a complete overhaul of their existing legacy systems. We’ve been able to help people reduce the burden of managing large libraries of content distributed across many internal learning systems. And we’ve even helped people find ways to start making sense of the data they’ve been collecting.

One question we received during our chat really helps set the stage for the tools we use to help our customers solve problems:

“How do I manage my content and data in a way that enables me to take advantage of xAPI across the different xAPI maturity levels of our learning tools?”

While we don’t have all the context surrounding this particular situation and environment, we do have the tools and strategies to help.

Content Controller is one of the most common tools we’ve used to help folks with mixed maturity environments. Using Content Controller, many of our customers have been able to not only use their existing SCORM content in a way that enables their LMSs to consume the SCORM course, but also produce xAPI data that can be shared with systems such as the Watershed LRS to provide analytics data that can correlate learning data and outcome data from within the organization.

From there, if you’re ready to start building xAPI content natively, Content Controller enables you to start using xAPI in your organization even if your LMS doesn’t support xAPI. The Content Controller tool allows you to make all your new xAPI courseware available to your existing LMS as a SCORM package with complete tracking and no changes to your existing LMS, while also tracking all the xAPI data you’re looking for.

As an added benefit, the Content Controller tool also makes it easier than ever to manage multiple versions of your courses across all of your existing learning platforms. We’re going to help you easily update your content in a single location and make those updates immediately available in all your other learning systems without the need to manually update the content libraries of every single learning platform every time you make updates.

If these challenges sound familiar, email us and let us know about your specific use case so we can help you find the perfect solution to your problem—whether it’s something we sell, a product we can point you toward, or just a good idea we’ve learned while working with all of our existing customers.

TJ is the Chief Technology Officer at PeopleFluent, another Learning Technologies Group company, though he used to be CEO here at Rustici Software. He is passionate, expressive and has the most distinctive laugh you’ll ever hear.