How you deliver and distribute your learning content is critical to helping your business scale. Delivery and distribution start with choosing a format for your online learning content (e.g. flip cards, video, live classes, photo stories, chapter PDFs), then choosing a platform that helps get your content to the consumer. Next, learning businesses must address how learners are going to consume content—specifically, what their learning environments looks like and how they begin the learning process.
In early days of online learning, human resource departments used their corporate intranet or basic learning management systems to deliver educational information to internal employees. These days, the online learning business has expanded to organizations looking to sell courseware to clients and partnersoutside of their organization to generate profit. These new use cases, paired with decreasing attention spans and increased need for unique learning content, forces organizations to consider more advanced learning business platforms.
Develop a Learning Content Distribution Strategy
When starting or scaling your online business, there is a number of ways to present your content to learners. Organizations might choose to distribute online content via a learning destination website, via a multi-tenant platform or via custom portals. It’s important to choose a platform that enables your organization to distribute content in each of—or most of—these ways to ensure you fulfill clients’ needs.
- Online training and learning destination: The first delivery method to consider in your content distribution strategy plan is creating a learning destination. This is a website or URL where all of your courseware lives and can be accessed by your clients or partners. In this model, the organization designs a learning content storefront where learners can purchase merchandise and register for courses.
- Multi-tenant platform: Another way to distribute your learning content is via a multi-tenant platform. In this model, organizations create custom landing pages and allow their clients and partners controlled access to courses and reporting.In this instance, your learning business can manage a large client base on one portal while also giving clients a custom branded learning experience. Another way to describe multi-tenant functionality is”license management”—an instance where your organization can create dedicated classrooms and courseware for clients and partners.
- Custom portal: Clients might come to you asking for a custom learning portal for which you create all of the content and manage it too. Finding a learning business platform that allows you to fulfill that request is key. “This is a really powerful offering in our Learning Business Platform™ ecosystem,” explained Thought Industries CEO Barry Kelly in a recent webinar. The Thought Industries offering allows learning businesses to create dedicated, stand-alone domains for clients in order to give them a custom branded learning experience. From here, your organization can create custom content or filter existing courseware into a certain client portal.
- Interoperable delivery: Learning businesses might be asked to deliver interoperable courseware files to organization in SCORM/xAPI formats. Kelly explains, “There are going to be clients, individuals and organizations that want your content, but want your content in their learning management system. That is what it is.” When it comes to the Thought Industries Learning Business Platform, “organizations can create content natively on our platform, then have the ability to distribute courseware to 3rd party LMSs, SCORM stubs, etc.”
Our CEO and co-founder Barry Kelly presents on content distribution strategy in a webinar with John Leh, CEO and lead analyst at Talented Learning. Watch the full webinar here.
