Re-use in the Real World: The Evolution of SPI's Learning Content Approach

Last Friday I attended a great webinar on re-use and the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS) hosted by our partners at GeoLearning.

The hour-long session was presented by Rick Judson of Sales Performance International (SPI) and GeoLearning's Dr. Paul Schneider.

SPI is a dominKnow LCMS client through our partnership with GeoLearning.

If you've ever heard of the phrase "Solution Selling®" then you are aware of the impact SPI has had on the world of sales. Solution Selling is SPI's trademarked methodology for approaching sales from a customer-centered perspective, and innumerable organizations use this approach throughout the world. It is the core of Microsoft's internal and partner sales training approach, for example. SPI offers training on the Solution Selling methodology, including online training created using the dominKnow LCMS.

Last Friday's webinar offered a look at how SPI's use of the dominKnow LCMS and its content management and re-use options has evolved in the past three or so years.

Evolved is the key - SPI's Rick Judson explained that SPI is currently in its third phase of re-use, and is already looking forward to evolving again.

SPI started out initially just using the LCMS as a course structuring system, working with a third-party partner to create Flash movies as pages uploaded into the LCMS. This approach, Rick explained, was one of expedience - SPI needed to get new courses made and simply altered an approach that it already had in place in order to meet initial timelines. These courses could be re-used for various audiences quite quickly, and tweaks and changes could be made by altering the Flash movies and updating them in the LCMS.

SPI's next leap in re-use came with the move to using the LCMS's integrated authoring tool. By moving to the authoring tool, SPI was able to make more granular re-use of page assets such as images or media files. Rather than having to update a graphic in several different Flash movies then update the files in the LCMS, graphic updates could be updated once in the LCMS's asset manager and then shared by all pages using the image, for example.

The next evolutionary step, Rick explained, was to move to the re-use of Learning Objects within the LCMS. The dominKnow LCMS allows the creation of complete, stand-alone instructional packages that address specific topics, tasks or enabling objectives to support the overall learning objectives in a course. These packages include knowledge presentation pages, review exercises and assessment questions. Here's a visual that explains how a Learning Object is constructed in the dominKnow LCMS. Rick noted that making this evolutionary step has offered several advantages to SPI, such as speeding up development, reducing errors and improving control over content. Along with this step, SPI has also taken advantage of the LCMS's translation support features to create versions of its online courses for other languages.

Rick said that SPI's next evolution will be to make a more concerted effort to work with re-usable templates in the LCMS's integrated Authoring Tool.

The webinar was a great glimpse into how a client is successfully taking advantage of re-use in many forms, all empowered by the LCMS, and we definitely appreciated Rick's time and energy.

If you are interested in learning more, here's a PDF copy of the presentation slide deck.

Our thanks to Rick and Paul for putting together an excellent learning event!

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.