At ATD 2017 this year, our CEO Tim Martin had a chance to talk about Content as a Service (CaaS). This conference was my first in eLearning, so I was excited to hear how companies are thinking about CaaS (or if they even know what it is). Out of the 125 attendees in Tim’s session 90% were from organizations, 5% were vendors and 5% fit into a category that was neither (or both!). On the organization side, the majority of attendees had more than one LMS and one poor soul had 10 LMSs to contend with in her company.
Tim discussed what Content as a Service is and how it solves the challenges of distributing courses across multiple systems by centralizing content in order to control and better understand the learning experience. (Sidenote: if you’re looking for further resources on CaaS, check out these blog posts). He also had a chance to answer some pretty common questions, such as…
How can an organization better distribute one piece of content to multiple LMSs?
For organizations who distribute content to multiple systems via individual files, content is not traditionally housed and managed in a central location. CaaS allows you to host a course in a single location and create proxy files to share with multiple LMSs that point back to that original course. When you update or edit your course, you edit a single file that is automatically available from each LMS.
What level of reporting is possible with CaaS?
CaaS enables you to see the usage of your content across all of your LMSs. Previously, any usage data or reporting was trapped in each LMS. With CaaS, the content and its corresponding data are centrally housed, allowing you to track both general utilization and deeper reporting like question-level analytics. Remember, reporting is always dictated by the eLearning specification you use.
How can vendors benefit from CaaS?
One of the coolest things about leveraging CaaS to distribute your content is that it empowers you to create unique, relevant experiences suited to specific learners. This is especially powerful for vendors who offer dynamically generated content within their system, which is hard to package and ship to an LMS.
Content as a Service also allows vendors to ensure the highest level of quality by consistently providing access to the latest version of a course. Financially, vendors are able to enforce the content licenses and subscriptions.
How can Content as a Service apply to a instructional designer?
Meet an instructional designer and you’ll quickly understand how passionate they are about creating eLearning content rooted in both design and science. With CaaS, an instructional designer can make sure the user always has the latest, best version of a course. And, they can finally understand how learners are interacting with a course (see reporting details above) so that they can adjust their content accordingly.
How are other businesses using CaaS?
If you’re looking for inspiration, look no further than the SANS Institute, who uses CaaS to help them efficiently manage and understand their eLearning content. If you want to know how Content as a Service can benefit you specifically or if you have a question about how it works, reach out to us.
