Using Convey to Power Your eLearning Ecosystem – Webinar

Here at dominKnow we have a 25-year history of helping organizations use learning to improve performance.

We released the first version of our Learning Content Management System (LCMS) about 20 years ago, as part of the first wave of eLearning.

It’s pretty obvious to say that over the years our product has evolved. What’s more interesting and more important to me is that our understanding of the learning and development space has also evolved.

Not too many years ago, if you asked me what we do I would have replied with something like, “We help organizations make great elearning content.”

These days, we take a much more holistic view of how we help. Great content is still important, but much more important is helping that content make an impact at the right time and place so that it truly helps your employees or your customers and directly contributes to performance improvement.

After all, learning isn’t an event, it’s an ongoing and continuous process.

No matter how great an elearning course is, once it’s completed in the LMS your learner will almost immediately start to forget at least parts of what they learned.

So being able to help your employees or your customers when they are actually carrying out their tasks is a mission-critical success strategy.

Our Convey Dynamic Publishing service plays a key role in helping our clients deliver formal learning in their LMS more efficiently plus easily provide informal and on-the-job learning support in the flow of work.

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So, What is Convey?

Convey is our integrated service for hosting content made in our dominKnow | ONE authoring platform.

With Convey your team can rapidly publish and update content without loading and updating SCORM, AICC, and CMI5 packages into an LMS or LRS.

It’s a simple one-two-three process: 

1. Author in dominKnow | ONE
2. Publish to Convey
3. Add the Convey link/stub package to your LMS or LRS

With Convey you can dramatically reduce time spent posting, updating and maintaining formal learning content in your LMS by as much as 90%. And one-click publishing ensures that your content is always up to date.

Plus with Convey, one click is all you need to instantly publish and deploy searchable knowledge bases, job aids and more so your employees and customers can access the knowledge they need in the flow of work.

Your informal learning is hosted on Convey so there’s no need to find a place in your IT infrastructure to put it.

Here’s a diagram that we’ve put together to help explain how dominKnow | ONE and Convey can help power your organization’s complete elearning ecosystem.

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We recently hosted a webinar to explain how the full suite of Convey and dominKnow | ONE work together to help two of our client teams.

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Powering Formal Learning in Your LMS

We were joined on the webinar by Ed Hjorth from Opentext and Shawna Lesseur from one of one of our client teams in the financial services space.

Ed’s team provides formal, LMS-tracked learning courses to help customers get up to speed in using Fortify, OpenText’s software-as-a-service tool for application security testing. The courses they create in dominKnow | ONE are based heavily on software lessons created with our Capture feature.

In the webinar, Ed explained that the initial process of adding a SCORM course to the LMS is so much quicker when they publish the SCORM package to Convey then load the much-smaller-sized Convey SCORM stub package into the LMS, compared to uploading courses that could be many MB in size.

For Ed’s team, Convey shines even brighter in the update process, when you need to make content changes and fixes.

“With a typical SCORM file you’re going to have to re-upload that SCORM file to the LMS, and that takes time, especially if you have to put in a ticket to get it done…Also, any progress for that particular course that a learner is taking, the progress is lost, it’s gone,” Ed explained.

“With Convey all you have to do is make the changes to the course, republish via dominKnow | ONE, that’s it. You don’t have to re-upload to the LMS, the learner progress is not affected, plus your learners get the updates faster.”

Shawna’s team provides compliance-focussed training content for their financial services organization.

Shawna explained how her team relies on dominKNow | ONE as its central content source to ensure consistent messaging for all audiences and also to help ensure content is accessible and meets requirements such as Section 508 and WCAG.

Using Convey to host their SCORM packages and then upload the Convey SCORM stub package to the LMS saves her team countless hours of time and effort.

Shawna gave an example of loading a single project into the LMS, having it tested by three testers plus doing that for five updates over the course of a year. In her estimation, that means 20 hours – a half a work week – of time spent on the upload and testing process for just that single course over the year.

If her team produces and updates 120 courses per year that need to be loaded into the LMS as full packages for every update, that would represent more than a full-time staff position.

“It can be a really heavy load to put things into that LMS and have to test it every time,” Shawna added. By using Convey in between their dominKnow | ONE site and their LMS, much of that time requirement is eliminated.

“Reducing that development labor and that testing burden while also eliminating the possibility of human error…it’s really not going to be as much of a threat to our success,” she said.

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Powering Informal and On-the-Job Learning in the Flow of Work

The OpenText team also provides its four courses as open links for customers who want a structured learning path but don’t need completion tracking. These are published as Convey public links and are gathered together on a central website hub for easy access.

The main task-related content from those four courses is also compiled into one more dominKnow | ONE project and published to Convey as a public link using our Knowledge Base Theme. The Knowledge Base theme provides a front page Search feature as well as menu access to the content.

And that Convey-hosted Knowledge Base link is embedded as a menu option in the Help section right inside the Fortify tool so customers can get instant learning and help while they work.

“We actually embedded this inside the Fortify product,” Ed explained. Learners can access it while working in Fortify right from the Help meu.

“It’s just in time learning,” Ed explained. “They get the info provided, they can access guides, they can download a job aid” all right within the Fortify software application.

Shawna explained how her team uses a modular content design approach to ensure that portions of their formal learning can also be published to Convey as instantly-accessible links to support a whole range of informal learning contexts.

An example are policy descriptions that are used as content pages within a course but also published as stand-alone job aids as Convey public links, which Shawna described as a snap-shot of the policy.

“It’s a one pager that expands to give you more information that you might need if you have a specific role, to do walk-throughs, train you how to use tools,” Shawna said. “This snapshot (link) can be given to the partners who own this policy.”

“They can put it in their email signatures. They can share it when people have questions so they can have that walk-through right there in front of them. And we can put it in the same place where they might perform those tasks. If you need to know the steps to do something, you didn’t just learn it in a training…you’re going to encounter that same thing in the flow of work – without me having to make three different things or 14 different things. And I know that it’s consistent, because it’s the exact same document,” she explained.

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Ready To See What dominKnow | ONE and Convey Can Do for Your Team?

If you’re ready to save time and money when publishing courses to your LMS or need a way to also provide informal learning in the flow of work without needing your IT team’s help, maybe it’s time to give dominKnow | ONE and Convey a try.

You can sign up for a free trial right here.

We’re confident you’ll agree with Shawna that, “dominKnow | ONE feels like a tool made for educators by educators.”

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