Learning content doesn’t just live in an instructor-led training (ILT), virtual instructor-led training (vILT), or eLearning bubble anymore. If you’re developing content, you have to deliver lots of different experiences to different audiences.
And that’s only possible at scale if you embrace omni-channel publishing.
Aligning Content, Access, and User Experience
In today’s world, people need to access knowledge within their workflow. They need to be able to look up information while they’re actively dealing with a situation.
In learning, this is often called “accessing content at the point of need.”
But in the context of user knowledge and access, a one-size-fits-all approach to content simply doesn’t work.
For example, content for a novice is more apt to be more comprehensive, with a course-like structure — you’ll need to guide them through all the different concepts from beginning to end.
But if you’re out in the field with a problem and you need to quickly access one specific piece of content, it’s imperative that you can easily find it, skim it, and move on quickly.
Or, say you’re already an expert, and you already know a lot of information on certain topics. Instead of a comprehensive course or document, you might simply be looking to fill in some blanks or extend your existing knowledge. It is likely you’re probably going to browse and skim until you find the specific piece of content you’re looking for, or a topic that you don’t know much about, and then you’ll do a deeper dive into that subject.
Whether you need complete training, a quick on-the-job resource, information, or skimmable information to fill in the gaps, you need to tailor content for these users and these experiences.
A one-size-fits-all world, where you publish content in large configurations, locked in inflexible proprietary formats, isn’t effective for today’s audiences.
That said, you also want to support all three experiences without creating a content maintenance nightmare. And that’s where omni–channel publishing with Xyleme can fill the gaps.
Omni-channel Publishing Eliminates Content Headaches
Once Xyleme is in place, you don’t have to do the formatting and duplicating that traditional tools require in order to reuse content across multiple audiences and delivery channels.
Let’s say you have a piece of content, like a reference guide or user manual, and you want to turn it into a performance support piece, like an online help document. With traditional tools, you’d copy and paste that content from one tool to the other.
That’s already extremely wasteful — it takes time, effort, and if anything changes, you have to make changes in multiple places.
Xyleme allows you to take that exact same content and easily reuse and publish it to different channels and formats. For example, you can publish a PDF guide and online help from the same source content, just by selecting different publishing channels.
Here’s another example: Imagine that you put lots of time and effort into an elearning course that was just published. But after publication, you find out that your team in the field needs that same information as a searchable reference guide in a PDF format.
With Xyleme, you can pull up that full elearning course, hit a button, and publish it in a PDF format. Now your field team has exactly what they need, and you didn’t have to invest any extra time building the same content over again. Another significant benefit is that you haven’t created a copy, so you won’t have maintain two separate outputs and keep them in snyc everytime a change occurs to that particular content.
By easily reusing content across output types and delivery channels, you can personalize and localize your content for each unique audience you serve, while reducing content development time simplifying maintenance so you can keep all of that content in sync.
