What's Important in a Learning Content Management System
As trainers and other educators suddenly find themselves evaluating expensive and complex server-side software—software in a functionality category that didn't even exist two years ago—it's hard to know what's what. To begin with, evaluating enterprise-class applications is inherently hard. Even the IT professionals aren't always very good at it. To make matters worse, the tools are constantly evolving and previously distinct software categories are merging as vendors rush to cram every feature imaginable into their offerings in an effort to stand out in the crowd. This article is my attempt to help you sort through at least some of the noise by helping you to answer one important question:
What do you really need?
It's easy to figure out which product has the most features. Much harder is figuring out which one has the right features. As somebody who has seen clients have both wonderful and terrible experiences with their LCMS's, I'm going to do my best to distinguish which features and which implementations of those features tend to give the best return-on-investment.
This article will not be a complete guide to everything you need to know about an LCMS. I don't know everything that you need to know about an LCMS because I don't know your particular situation. Nor am I intimately familiar with even half of the LCMS products on the market today. I won't provide a laundry list of all the features these various products have and I also won't discuss any of the features that I don't consider to be directly related to the management of learning content (or even some that are related, like personalization of content delivery.)
I'm going to focus on the problems of learning content production, since it is the content production problem that the CMS was invented to solve. Since organizations that purchase LCMS's typically start looking at these tools because they are faced with the challenge of producing and maintaining a daunting amount of custom e-learning content, I'm going to focus on the common problems that make that challenge so difficult and the low-hanging fruit where a properly designed LCMS can dramatically increase efficiencies, reduce cost, and release more time and resources to focus on the what really matters: teaching learners.
The rest of this article is organized into the following sections:
- The History of Content Management
- What's Unique About Learning Content
- The Need
- Templating and Navigation Automation
- Workflow Automation
- Bad Ideas and Other Distractions
- What I'd Like To See Next
The History of Content Management
As far as I know, the modern content management system was invented in 1996 by c|net, the Internet news publishing company. As one of the web's first high-volume publishers, c|net faced some fairly serious production challenges that were new to the world. Web publishing is a fairly complex process. First, the author has to submit an article, written using tools that are intuitive for a non-technical writer to use. Then an editor needs to review the article and make changes, possibly even sending the article back to the author for editing. Next, it needs to go on to the copyeditor. Multiple versions of the document could be flying back and forth among the author, editor, and copyeditor. Once the content is finalized, it needs to be put into the layout in which it will appear on the site. The editor may decide to add related links. Somebody needs to decide where on the site the article will go. And once it's all done, somebody has to post the article to the public web site.
This is a challenging process to manage with even a handful of articles. C|net had to manage it with dozens of articles every day. Plus, with the creation of "Internet time," news needed to be updated even faster than daily newspapers had ever had to respond. The company needed to be able to collapse the entire process for publishing an article down to a matter of hours while simultaneously handling a huge number of articles.
The solution to this kind of problem is to automate any part of the process that doesn't require human judgment. Writers can type their articles directly into the publishing system using a web-based text editor. When the article is submitted online, it can instantly be made available to the editor, who also could receive an email alert that a new article is ready for review. The editor can then make changes online and click the "submit" button, which sends it on to the copy-editor. Since most articles are generally presented in one of a small handful of well-established layouts, the editor need only choose the appropriate layout template and the article will automatically be formatted appropriately. Likewise, the editor can click a few buttons to choose where on the site the article will be published and when it will go up, and the system will take care of the rest. No further human intervention is necessary. (Note that I'm not familiar with c|net's particular publication workflow. What I'm describing here are relatively generic features of a CMS.)
In this new system, most of the painful issues of paper passing, logistics, and scheduling are handled by the software. Editors can focus on editing. Writers can focus on writing. Programmers and graphic designers aren't really needed for the production of typical articles, and when they are needed they are only handling the aspects of the article that are unique. The CMS doesn't write good content for you, but it does clear away most of the clutter that distracts you from the task of writing good content.
C|net quickly realized that the tool they had built for themselves would be valuable to anyone who has large quantities of content that need to be published and kept up-to-date online, whether they are news sites, e-commerce sites (think Amazon.com), or corporate intranets. They licensed the technology to a company called Vignette, which is still the leading CMS provider today.
Up until recently, CMS's were not being used in online learning because the return on investment was not there. A CMS is usually an expensive piece of software both to buy and to set up. When all is said and done, it often costs anywhere from $150,000 to $500,000. (Some companies have easily spent a million dollars or more, depending on the purpose of the system and the elaborateness of the customization required.) In order to justify this cost, the system users have to be creating and maintaining a large enough volume of content that the system will pay for itself through the incremental savings of time and money required to produce each content item. In the last few years, significant numbers of organizations have started producing enough in-house custom e-learning content to justify the expense of a CMS. Between the increasing numbers of organizations that actually need a CMS for online learning and the fact that CMS prices have been coming down (albeit slowly), a market is beginning to grow.
Unfortunately, the needs of a CMS for Internet news publishing and the needs of a CMS for e-learning are not quite the same. Both the end product and the workflow process that produces it are unique to e-learning. Before we can benefit from c|net's innovations, we have to think through those differences carefully. We need to come up with a learning content management system, or LCMS.
