Alarm.com is a leading property security company offering a variety of security and automation services and hardware for the residential and commercial markets. Centered on security and remote monitoring, their services protect millions of people through their integrated platform that enables application-based control for a growing list of internet-connected devices.
The challenge
Alarm.com’s security and automation services are only available through licensed security experts. This network of over 10,000 dealer partners and 100,000 individual learners use Alarm.com’s training to learn about installing and troubleshooting security hardware and software. Alarm.com has two distinct learning audiences who all require the same courseware but access this content using a variety of LMSs and platforms that may or may not support the same publishing standards. They needed a way to distribute their courseware in varying standards to their external partners through Skilljar or to their larger dealer partners’ LMSs, while simultaneously providing access to the same content through Workday Learning to an internal customer support department assisting these external partners.
Prior to using Content Controller, distributing content to different LMSs was a very manual process consisting of saving SCORM exports into a file sharing program and sending those files individually to customers. Each learning module needed to be published a minimum of two to three times in different versions to account for differing eLearning standards (SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004 3rd Edition and cmi5). The content management process was a very siloed and time-consuming experience that relied on a complex system of spreadsheets and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that everyone on the team needed access to.
In order to manage necessary content updates and change requests, the training team utilized a strict bimonthly maintenance window to push the newly modified content across the different platforms. The process was time and resource intensive and required changes to occur outside of normal business hours to prevent disruption to learners and their progress.
These manual procedures rapidly led to difficulties in content management and administration. Alarm.com aimed to not only minimize their internal content management workload, but also to guarantee that their learners received up-to-date training seamlessly. They sought to avoid overburdening their customers with numerous versions and the cumbersome task of repeatedly re-uploading content.
““The process before Content Controller was complex and introduced a lot of opportunities for user pain. We would have to interrupt progress in a course to update it, or we relied on a very complex updating and maintenance schedule.””
The solution
Alarm.com approached Rustici Software seeking assistance in disseminating training for their partners and internal team, as well as, refining their content revision process. By using Content Controller, Alarm.com has streamlined the delivery of training materials to both their own Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and those of their partners, accommodating various publishing standards and thus saving on administrative efforts. Additionally, Alarm.com has gained the advantage of better version control over their content, along with the use of cmi5 and xAPI, which offers detailed insights into the usage of their training materials.
The benefits
Managing content while scaling with growth
Alarm.com was seeing a large increase in their LMS usage internally and externally, and they needed a solution that would not only support their current users, but scale with them as their learner counts grow. They now use Content Controller in place of their previous manually intensive process, which allows them to add new learners without adding hours of more work.
Ensuring their partners have the latest content version
Technologies are constantly changing, and Alarm.com wanted their learners to always have access to the latest content updates. With Content Controller, they can make even very minor updates to the UI or content without impacting learners or their progress. This solution allows the Alarm.com team to store the version of the content they want, in their case cmi5. Then they can dispatch it out in different versions, such as to an LMS that only supports SCORM 1.2, while tracking in both their preferred cmi5 standard and the LMS’s required standard.
Protecting and licensing content
Alarm.com has larger, external dealer partners and wanted to have a way to maintain control over the courses and course elements their partners receive. Content Controller’s licensing feature solves this common challenge of protecting intellectual property by allowing them to automatically enable and disable access to the content.
Seeing more granular analytics with xAPI and cmi5
To support their overall data strategy, the team at Alarm.com is in the process of implementing a Learning Record Store (LRS), and the more granular data insights from using cmi5 and xAPI is important to their future content plans. With Content Controller, Alarm.com can consolidate all the user activity information for their eLearning modules using the built-in LRS by pushing all of the interactions, completion, scoring and information through a single endpoint. It avoids any custom integrations or a manual process to export .CSV data from an LMS.
Growing their international audience and using Equivalents
As Alarm.com expands into other countries and their international presence grows, Content Controller helps their efforts through Equivalents. The Equivalents feature makes a single course file that supports multiple language modules that can be sent to an LMS. Then when the course is launched, the learner can select which language is appropriate for them.
The results
Since implementing Content Controller in 2021, Alarm.com has already seen impressive results, including:
- Reducing the overall administrative burdens, which helped the team to be able to focus on content and better support their customers and learners.
- Increasing the number of new courses from 2022 to 2023 by over 400%.
- Creating one source of truth for their internal customer support department and external partners audiences, which equates to time saved managing content.
- Reducing maintenance downtime to virtually zero when updating courses. Instructional designers and developers can make updates immediately or whenever they choose.
- Improving the partner experience by ensuring their learners are always working off the latest course version. Before Content Controller, Alarm.com had a multi-step process for changes that would be made on the first Tuesday of every month. The changes are now made, updated and versioned in the platform.
- Capturing better learner data to understand trends and correlate analytics across many dispersed platforms.
“Content Controller has really streamlined our content management to the point that we don’t have to spend as much time doing it and don’t depend on a single content manager. Our team is now agile enough that anybody can go in and manage content themselves, so Content Controller has saved us money in that regard. More importantly, it's allowed us to spend our time focusing on other things, like developing content instead of managing it.”
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