How Single Sourcing Does the Work of an Army

How Single Sourcing Does the Work of an Army
Summary: Why is single sourcing such a big deal? If you have heard of the concept, you might realize it can be a big deal for a number of reasons. For one, it gives a few course eLearning developers the tools to do the work of an army. A single source mentality means eLearning content is created once, stored in a central repository (ideally the cloud) and then with the click of a button published to just about any eLearning platform one could possibly imagine.

Is Single Source Worth it?

Single Source is a relatively simple concept to grasp, but it seems to be a hard concept for many instructional designers to implement. Basically, single sourcing allows for reduced redundancy, established consistency, improved content reuse, and reduction in time spent on updates. It allows the instructional designer to focus on the most important thing: creating eLearning content that performs. The truth is, putting eLearning content into reusable nuggets can take some time to implement. But we have seen client’s report back results that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without this concept.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Take the story of Xyleme, Inc. client, Information Builders. Information Builders is a worldwide leader in business solutions and support, educates customers at over 12,000 sites worldwide, across Fortune 500 and mid-market companies, government agencies, and universities. This is a big job to do, and prior to single sourcing their learning content, Information Builders was painstakingly manually updating each of its 30 courses several times a year. Because all of the content was in print-only formats like Microsoft Word, the course developers had no standardized content.

Ask Sr. Manager of Curriculum Development Emily Deunsing how important she thinks single-source and reusable content is, and you are likely to get an answer such as, “Because of Xyleme’s ability to make reuse of rich content quick and simple across the LCMS, our common content consistency has gone from a nightmare to maintain across many courses, to one update and done.”

When Information Builders completed their implementation of the Xyleme LCMS, they were able to increase the percentage of students trained on both Online Courseware and ILO, both by 10% over two years. Imagine as a member of the Learning and Development team in an organization being able to show results like that from your learning programs. That is one way to build your team’s perception as a strategic business unit!

Effective Single Sourcing

It is through this success that Information Builders is excited to speak about their success using single-source, reusable content, and publishing that content through mobile sources.

Information Builders is partnering with Xyleme to give a live webinar on Thursday, June 19 at 11 am Mountain about this very topic of effective single sourcing. In this session, Emily Duensing, Sr. Manager of Curriculum Development and Andy Nivison, VP of Customer Education at Information Builders, will share how single-sourcing has transformed the way they author, publish and deliver critical learning content to their customers. They will discuss how in a short time, they have achieved high efficiency, global customer satisfaction and seamless delivery of content on any device.

Dawn Poulos, VP of Xyleme will moderate the session in a casual, interview format with engaging “show and tell” from Emily and Andy. Click here to register. Or, read the case study to learn more.