Tag: content distribution

Traditional copyright law allows content authors to reserve all rights. While this is still going to be appropriate in many cases, you now have the opportunity to make your content much more accessible to those who want to copy, distribute, edit, remix or build upon your work.
If you are comfortable with granting some or all of these rights, you can do so using a Creative Commons license. You specify the terms on which you want to make your content available and then provide the appropriate Creative Commons license alongside your content. Doing so makes absolutely clear to learners what they can and cannot legally do. How far you go will, of course, depend entirely on your business model and your educational philosophy.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, December 2011

Whichever format you choose for your content, you need a way to make this accessible to learners. As ever, there are plenty of options:
Use your intranet or internet web site: A relatively simple option is to make your content available directly on your web site. It’s probable that your organisation uses a content management system (CMS) of some sort (such as Microsoft SharePoint) as a platform for your website, in which case you can work directly within this. As well as inputting the HTML content, you’ll need to upload any additional files such as Flash movies, audio, video, PDFs and native documents and either embed these in the HTML or link to them for download. This may sound complex, but it won’t take long before you know your way around the CMS. An advantage of having your learning content on your website is that it will be easily searchable and linkable alongside all your other website content. Note that, while you will be able to track the number of users of your content, you will not normally be able to identify them by name, nor will you be able to record how they fared.
Use a learning management system (LMS): If you need to catalogue and make available large volumes of formal learning content and to track learner scores or progress, then you are going to require some form of LMS or virtual learning environment (VLE). These systems are compliant with e-learning standards such as SCORM, AICC or IMS, which provide important functionality such as the ability to track learner scores and progress, to describe content with metadata (descriptive labels) and to specify the sequence in which learning content should be presented. None of these features are going to work unless your authoring tool is also compliant with the standards, but you can expect this to be the case.
Use a content sharing site: Another way to make your content available is by using site specially designed to allow users to share content. This could be a public site, such as YouTube (for video) or SlideShare (for presentation), or a system offering similar functionality but sitting inside the firewall. Content sharing sites are designed to achieve much more than deliver top-down, formal learning content: they allow users to rate, tag (categorise), recommend and comment on the content they view; more importantly, these systems allow users to upload their own content. Clearly a content sharing site is much more informal and collaborative in nature than an LMS, but they can work happily side-by-side; indeed some LMSs now include content sharing modules.
Distribute through an app store: Smart phone and tablet users can access content on any of the platforms described above through their device’s own web browser. In many cases this will be adequate. However, content distributed this way is rarely formatted with the mobile user in mind and may be slow and cumbersome to access. For regularly used content, a much more elegant solution is to create applications which can be downloaded using the device’s app store and then accessed with a single touch. Given the technical differences between the various mobile devices, this may for now seem a rather complex way to distribute your content, but the process of app development will inevitably become much simpler as new tools become available. In the meantime, some forms of content can be made available for mobile devices without being formatted as apps. Podcasts and vodcasts can be made available through Apple’s iTunes software for use on iPods and other Apple devices. Reference manuals and books can be formatted for use on e-book readers such as the Kindle or Sony Reader, or for smart phones and tablets.

Use	When
Your internet or intranet web site	You want users to be able to easily search for and link to your content from within your website You don’t want to have to set up a new platform for your content
An LMS	You want to include your content within formal courses You need to record learner progress and scores
A content sharing site	You want your content to act as a catalyst for peer-to-peer user interaction You want users to be able to upload their own content
An app store	You want your content to be specifically tailored for mobile use You want to provide the quickest possible access to your content

Part 1 Part 2
Coming in part 4: Establishing copyright
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, December 2011

Learning content can be distributed online in a number of formats. Let’s compare them …
Native document: By this we mean the output format of a proprietary application, most commonly Word, Excel or PowerPoint. These applications have sophisticated editing and formatting capabilities, but were never really designed as a means for distributing finished content. The consumer has to have their own copy of the application that was used to prepare the original document and often in a particular version. The documents can be bulky to download because their file formats are not optimised for online use. They are slow to display, because the application has first to be loaded into memory. Perhaps most annoyingly, it is all too easy for multiple versions to be in circulation at any one time. There will be exceptional circumstances where the native document format must be maintained, perhaps because learners will be required to edit the documents, perhaps because the functionality of the native format is critical (you could be using Excel as the platform for a simulation), but more often than not, you will be better off using one of the other formats below.
PDF: This is the Portable Document Format as developed in 1994 by Adobe, but now an open standard. It’s original purpose was to get round the problem of users having to have their own copies of the applications and typefaces used by writers and designers to prepare documents and artwork. When you consider the cost of office applications, let alone sophisticated desktop publishing and graphics software, you can see why this format has proved so valuable. Having said this, PDF was never originally conceived as a format for online distribution. Where it really scores is that it preserves all the formatting of the original document, which is important when you have applied a lot of expertise to the design. Most importantly, by staying faithful to the original, this allows for highly professional-looking print-outs. To view a PDF file, users require only the free Adobe Reader. To create PDF files, it used to be necessary to own a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional, but now many applications, including those in the Microsoft Office suite, have a built-in facility to save to PDF. As of 2011, some 150 million PDF documents were available online on the World Wide Web.
HTML: It is with Hypertext Mark-up Language that all web pages are formatted. While the format has been extended enormously over the years, and a great deal of programming capability has been integrated (using JavaScript), it still works in much the same way that Tim Berners-Lee first designed it. Because HTML resides within the public domain and can be used freely by anyone, it has been widely adopted as a standard on just about every computing device that accesses the internet. While HTML has many capabilities, it has not until recently had much functionality to offer in terms of animation, audio and video, a gap that has been filled largely by Adobe Flash. However, the next generation of HTML, version 5, promises to remedy these deficiencies and could eventually lead to the demise of Flash.
Flash: Flash was developed originally as an animation tool called FutureSplash Animator. It was acquired by Macromedia in 1996 and by Adobe in 2005. Flash grew in popularity as a way to provide sophisticated animation and multimedia facilities on the World Wide Web and has proved particularly popular for games, adverts and e-learning. Flash files, or ‘movies,’ can be created using Adobe’s own Flash Professional application, or by any number of e-learning authoring tools. The movies are then integrated into HTML pages for viewing online by any user who has the Flash plug-in installed (which is just about everyone). While not as versatile as pure HTML for everyday internet use, Flash excels where sophisticated multimedia and interactivity are critical. This would explain why the overwhelming majority of e-learning materials are distributed in this format. The future of Flash is currently in question, largely because of the refusal of Apple to allow Flash on its iPhone and iPad. With a future that looks increasingly mobile, many e-learning authoring tool vendors are looking more closely at HTML5.

Use	When
Native documents	You want users to be able to edit the documents You want to preserve some unique functionality of the native format, e.g. modelling in Excel
PDF	You expect users to print the content You need to preserve the exact look of the original document
HTML	You want to provide the easiest possible access to your content You want to be able to edit the content easily
Flash	Your content is multimedia-rich Your content incorporates interactivity that is not easily achievable in HTML

Part 1
Coming in part 3: Choosing a platform for your content
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, December 2011

Before Sir Tim Berners-Lee did us all a big favour some twenty years ago by inventing the World Wide Web, the distribution of content was a very physical process. Regardless of the format – book, CD, DVD or whatever – some form of ‘master’ would be produced and this would be used as a basis for the manufacture of the finished goods. These would then be boxed up and physically distributed to wholesalers, retailers and eventually end customers. The books and CDs would end their journey neatly lined up on shelves or in racks, ready for consumption. How quaint this process is beginning to look come 2012.
While there is still a market for ‘offline media’ (the sort you can use without an internet connection), it is fast dwindling. Sales of printed media, CDs and DVDs are dropping rapidly as the price of computer memory drops and bandwidth increases. Why would anyone clutter up their valuable living space with piles of dusty books and CDs when they can store as many as they could possibly consume in a lifetime on a Kindle, on an iPod or somewhere in the cloud? Why indeed? No-one under thirty would even consider it.
Learning content obeys the same rules. Why burden employees with huge ring binders full of hand-outs and reference manuals to sit unopened on their shelves when the same information can be made available online at the click of a mouse? Information that can be easily maintained, indexed, searched and cross-referenced; and which costs nothing to replicate or distribute.
In the old world, learning content was a bit of an after-thought. The course stood central to all learning activity. Your course manual was not much more than a trophy; something to display in your office to show everyone how much you had supposedly learned.
With the shift from ‘courses’ to ‘resources,’ content becomes critical. No-one expects anymore to have to struggle to absorb large volumes of information during a course. Yes, they want insights into important new concepts and principles. But the rest they want to be able to access quickly and easily if and when they need it. How you distribute learning content is now central to the potential success of any intervention.
Coming in part 2: Choosing a format for your content
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, December 2011