Washing machines, and what does it have to do with AI?
I’ll take you back to the good old days, as some remember it. Sitting out by a river, carrying your laundry out and scrubbing the living daylights out of it for hours. Maybe this wasn’t so good, and thus, a very smart individual invented washing machines. When these contraptions first arrived on the scene, many thought this would be the end of the chore of washing your clothes. But as time went on, we actually did more laundry than ever before! We obviously do this more efficiently now by removing much of the physicality of it and improving the overall hygiene. While we don’t do less washing, WE DO do less time-intensive physical work, allowing us to refocus on other chores and tasks.
To this day, people still believe that AI tools will take away many jobs and work involved in learning and development. We think it is more like a washing machine. That is why we see the opportunity not to take all the work away but to remove the time-intensive parts so we can focus on more important things. One piece of work we see AI helping with is content library management- using AI to make it easier to know what’s in your library and find it when you need it.
eLearning content discoverability, stuck in the olden days
Now you might say, a growing library is great, why bother trimming and organizing it? More content means more ways to personalize and create impactful learning experiences. Much like my closet, the problem comes with it getting messy. You are looking for that perfect piece of content but it is piled on top of all different PDFs, videos, different versions of the same course, and more. At this point, you don’t know how the pile got so big, whether by accident or from management shifts, but you do know it needs help. Because this pile of content is standing between you and reaching your learners and goals.
That’s why it all starts with the normalization of metadata and processes. Putting the good data in and improving on bad data allows you to find content and improve efficiencies in your curation easily. What is going to matter to achieve success is a careful approach, with some added technical help, to the library organization and management.
Rustici Generator, helping you spark joy
That’s where Rustici Generator comes in to make sense of any messy load of content. Rustici Generator works with Rustici Engine to help you parse through your content library, including content from authoring tools or things like video, webpages and PDFs. It then uses AI to generate suggested metadata for said content and enhance search capabilities within your platform. This combo gives you better data going into your library with more accurate and filled in metadata, combined with the improved search for a content discoverability powerhouse.
In one example, Generator can help fix what you have now to help you fill in the metadata gaps in your library. When you parse through a piece of content, it will scan through the whole course, PDF, and more to build out a fully-encompassing breakdown of what text is within the content. Once you have that, you can either expose that to get a clear picture of what the course is about or you can send that information off to help generate new or updated metadata. These metadata suggestions can either be accepted or edited, giving you a head start to having more discoverable content.
In another example, Generator can help you find what you’re looking for from your library. Now that your content is tidied up with more helpful metadata and parsed content text, you can not only use your own searching tools more efficiently but you can also utilize Generator’s semantic and lexical search too. These terms are basically fancy ways of saying it can essentially search within your content, looking at all the content’s parsed text to help you find words and phrases that are being discussed. Finding your content fast has a whole new meaning with these new search tools at your disposal.
Maximizing impact with effective content curation
With any task that we do, we are always trying to maximize the time we have so we can focus on more important tasks or simply get back time at all. We really believe that the path forward in our content-centric world is data normalization and enhanced content discoverability. Rustici Generator is our first step towards this idea, and we are excited for all the back-breaking loads of laundry to come.
Rustici Generator is coming soon to the suite of Rustici Software products in 2025, but if you are interested in learning more about it and how we are looking to solve content discoverability, you can subscribe to updates or reach out to our team to learn more.
Plus, we have a webinar coming up where we will go more in depth to how Rustici Generator works, who this tool will work best for, and a whole lot more. Sign up to join us November 19th 2024 at 10 am CT to decipher your content maze with Rustici Generator.
