Engineering Your Content for Learning Management Systems

by Paul Eisenberg

May 2006

Many publishers are considering or have already begun implementing Learning Management Systems (LMS) as a way to deliver added value along with existing content products, deepen customer relationships, and exploit business opportunities in the growing market for online education. Implementing a LMS is a large project. There will be no shortage of tasks ranging from configuring your IT infrastructure to training production staff and users. Central to the effort should be the analysis and preparation of your content. We’ve assembled a checklist of key items that you should consider covering in your planning cycle.

Know What You’ve Got

The interesting thing about Learning Management Systems is their ability to digest and deliver just about any kind of content. While some publishers may be using XML, many more rely on a wide variety of assets types from many sources. Popular formats include Word, PowerPoint, PDF, and of course all of those rich media assets including various flavors of graphics, video, sound, and interactive simulations.

While it may seem obvious, good planning starts with developing a detailed understanding of your inputs. In addition to making sure you have inventoried all file formats, make sure to document the volume of each type and note any qualitative issues that may need to be addressed. Not only will this enable you to make sure you’ve got all the bases covered later, you can also use the information you gather at this point to determine and set the right expectations regarding what’s going to get imported and when.

Plan to Phase In Quality Improvements

Questions about the intended quality of source documents crop up consistently in every implementation. In this context, quality can mean many things. It could refer to pedagogical value, technical accuracy and compatibility, or even layout and formatting. Regardless, you can bet that someone will ask if your organization should fix all of the known issues with any given set of materials before loading them up in the new system.

This is a great question. It makes perfect sense. After all, who would want to tarnish that shiny new system with flawed materials? And what could be a better time than now, when you’ll be processing the content anyhow. Absolutely right! This stage is an opportune time to address all sorts of quality issues. At the same time there are often legitimate business considerations that force organizations to focus on speed to market and make certain compromises in this area at least for the initial upload. Indeed many times a phased approach that deals with the most egregious issues right away and leaves relatively minor problems for the next round of content updates is best. Ultimately, the right choice is a business decision.

The point here is that you’ll want to be sure you know what you’ve got, how much of it there is, and the scope of quality issues that may need to be addressed before you try to do any other planning.

Architect Business Model Compatibility

Next up, you’ve got to get a handle on the business model. You must be prepared to devise content structures that will be compatible with both your business plan and your vendor’s content modeling and security frameworks. This can be trickier than it sounds.

From the publisher’s point of view, enabling users to buy access to everything from individual content objects to complete courses and curriculums might be ideal. Making this idea a reality however can get challenging when it intersects with per-user licensing fees and course based access control models. Creative thinking is needed to avoid duplicate data structures and burdensome user management overhead. Ultimately, the degree of difficulty in getting it right will depend mostly on the complexity of your business and the flexibility available within the solution you have selected. Regardless, mismatches can have serious and expensive consequences so this is an area that is well worth investing time into.

Convert Data to Web Friendly Formats

As mentioned earlier, it is not uncommon for publishers to begin the journey to LMS-based delivery using legacy content from multiple sources. While web technologies have matured substantially during the past decade, widespread adoption of broadband access technologies that has made distribution of rich multimedia content easier and more practical is still a relatively recent development. At the same time, many publishers have continued to rely on CD-ROM based distribution of digital content.

So if you are planning to move all of that content to the web, make sure to include time in your project plan for cataloging and converting all of those old .AVI and .EXE files to formats that are more compatible with browser based delivery such as Flash video (.FLV). In cases where it is not possible to convert an old executable, you may need to resort to prompting the learner to download them as compressed archives that can be installed locally. Here again while most LMS’s are omnivores when it comes to devouring content, one way to improve the learner’s experience is by homogenizing assets using a consistent set of web- native file formats. In general XML, HTML, and PDF are going to be your best bet for any document based content you want to include.

Consider Accessibility

At this point, most LMS vendors claim that their products comply with Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act. Others go a step further and claim compliance with W3C web content accessibility guidelines. In addition, many systems have built-in authoring tools and configuration options that enable developers to create compliant content or enhance compatibility with assistive technologies. The key here is to realize that the vendor claims are relevant only to the LMS, not your content: they can’t fix that. Publishers need to take responsibility for their content. While a complete discussion of the topic is beyond the scope of this article, big ticket items include:

Avoid using tables for layout
Tag all rows, columns, cells, and framesets for easy identification
Do not rely exclusively on color or sound to convey meaning
Include ALT tags on all graphics
Do not script navigation controls
Include keyboard shortcuts and tab order all navigation controls
Avoid blinking text and image maps
Carefully select fonts and colors to maximize contrast and readability
Code pages such that browser text size settings continue to work properly

Enable Reusability & Interchange

Best practice dictates that LMS content should be designed to maximize reusability. When considering reusability, it is important to realize that the concept can be applied within the context of the target LMS and to content interchange with other systems. One way to maximize re-use is to organize content into chunks called learning objects. While opinions on the subject vary, learning objects are generally defined as self-contained units of educational material that typically (but not always) include at least one learning objective and a means of assessment. The goal with learning objects is to create items that can be mixed and matched to create groups when you or other users want to create new modules and courses from existing content. Not only are well formed learning objects easier to reuse, they also tend to increase the instructional soundness of your content which increases the overall quality and usefulness of the information you want to communicate.

Looking forward, the topic-based Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard appears to have great potential in this area if you are publishing in XML (see my recent blog on the subject)

If interchange with other systems is a goal, then chances are you have already begun to look at the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM). Like those accessibility guidelines discussed earlier, SCORM conformance applies to both the platform and the content. On the platform side of the equation, many of the most popular LMS platforms claim compliance with one version or another. That’s great for publishers because many content consuming customers have SCORM compliance on their requirements checklist. More importantly, if you need to support more than one LMS platform, SCORM has the potential to save you effort by standardizing your packaging of content into a format digestable by many systems. That savings however will have to be earned through serious investment.

One way to generate SCORM packages is to upload all of your content into your primary LMS and then export it. Completing this task will give you what you need to support other systems, but the “getting it done” will involve manual effort. A better method is to explore the use of tools and scripts that can output SCORM packages directly from your production pipeline. This way you launch your content on all of your target platforms simultaneously. If you go this route, be prepared to spend a bit more time defining your metadata, sequencing, and scoring requirements. Testing on target platforms is recommended too.

GUI Considerations

Whether you are using SCORM or not, it is important to consider the fact that every LMS has its own interface. Sounds obvious right? Since the look and feel of every system will be different, you may want to consider optimizing your content so that it will look good in the widest possible range of cases. For example, reducing graphics sizes slightly may enable your content to fit more comfortably into framesets that vary in size and layout.

Minimize Maintenance Requirements

Loading the content into the system is one thing, maintaining it over time is something else. One way to ease the burden is to identify resources that can be loaded once and linked to multiple contexts. This effort will minimize duplication of assets. Instead, choosing the right option during an update to the master copy will cause the latest version to appear wherever the asset is used.

Improve Searchability

To the extent that search capabilities are included in your LMS of choice, you will want to maximize the results that are generated for users. The secret here is really no secret at all-you need metadata!

There are plenty of standards out there such as the Dublin Core, PRISM, and SCORM’s Learning Object Metadata (LOM) model. Models targeting specific verticals such as the Healthcare industry are available too. In all cases you will want to cover a minimum number of basics such as Title, Description, Objectives, Delivery style, Intended Learners, Creator, and Copyright Information. Beyond that you will need to consider additional options and use of pre-defined vocabularies. And when in actual use, make sure your production staff is familiar with the meaning of all terms. In addition, the use of metadata is another area where ongoing maintenance and overhead requirements come into play as well.

Our best advice is to build based on minimum current requirements first. You can easily add more fields later. By the same token reducing the number of fields is more complicated and rarely done.

Adaptive Learning Paths

Many in the publishing industry have long shared the vision of providing learners with tools and content that support adaptive learning. In this scenario, the LMS is able to compare learner performance to a set of specified competencies or goals and deliver an appropriate subset of the available material. Until now, few systems have implemented support for this functionality. Moving forward we can expect that to change as more systems certify conformance with SCORM 2004. The most recent edition of SCORM includes support for adaptive sequencing and navigation. Publishers interested in taking advantage of this functionality will need to include appropriate information in their content packages.

Conclusion

In summary, you need to take a broad range of considerations into account when preparing content for upload into an LMS. For starters, make sure you have a handle on your inventory of assets. Next, scope out relevant quality issues and create a plan for implementing improvements over time. Continue the process by making sure to devise a content structure that will be compatible with the system and business models you want to support. Remember you may also need to convert a portion of your content to web friendly formats. Along the way you will want to consider accessibility requirements, adopt relevant standards moving forward, and build time into your plan to implement changes. Organizing content into learning objects will maximize reusability and packaging them using SCORM will enable interchange with other systems. Other considerations include layout, maintenance, searchability, and sequencing. As you can see preparing your content for LMS integration is no small task. Nevertheless, the process is manageable and success can be achieved using a stepwise approach.