You’ve all been there. You have created some content here then looked over there, and you’ve seen the same flavor of content designed in a bit of a different way and for a somewhat different audience. Maintaining consistency in the learning and development world can be challenging. That is why content reuse can be such a valuable strategy to have in your pocket. When paired with an agile design approach, consistency makes building learning programs much more approachable and streamlined.
What Is Content Reuse?
Content reuse differs depending on the individual’s experience and background. This tactic is when you take content (oftentimes small chunks of it) that has already been created for one use case and leverage it for another use case or deliverable. This can be taking knowledge base articles and reusing that content to build out courses or taking presentations created by a hiring manager to onboard their new hires and turning that into an onboarding course to be distributed across the company. It can be reusing the same steps or snippets in one article in other outputs like a job aid, manual, course, or webpage. It can even be taking a full program created for an internal persona and using a majority of the content for an external audience that needs to be able to master the same skills.
The important distinction is that content reuse is not copying and pasting.
Agile Development’s Relationship With Content Reuse
This type of reuse and recycling of content is one of the pillars of developing learning programs in an agile way. If you are looking to start building content in an agile environment, then content reuse is going to get you there. The ability to quickly take content in a modular way and piece it together in different outputs depending on your audience is how you go from a drawn-out ADDIE driven design to a quick, targeted and streamlined SAM-driven design (the successive approximation model, which is a simplified and more agile version of ADDIE). In this approach, you have already performed the analysis and the design of the snippets of content. Now you have to match them up with the correct personas, tweaking to make sure the tone and viewpoint is correct for the intended persona and then running it through evaluation and launch. You are getting from point A to point Z much quicker, thus being more agile. And when you have these pieces in smaller blocks of modular content, you can iterate in bite-sized pieces.
Challenges of Content Reuse and Ways to Overcome Them
But wait, this sounds so easy! There have to be challenges, right? Well, yes. The challenges here are real. Content reuse, while it is a fantastic way to get to the end point quicker, is a bear to maintain. Think about it. You have this content that you are reusing from several different outputs: PowerPoint, Word, Google Docs, loose-leaf paper, Captivate files, videos, webinar recordings. And these might be used in several different places. Content pulled from here and added to there. So, when it comes time for the company to release its sparkly new feature set, you need to go and find every single place in your training, knowledge base, and resources that need to be updated. Inevitably, something gets missed and now you have a maintenance and versioning nightmare. You also may need some of this content you are reusing to say and portray different bits of information based on the audience or persona. So, how do we make sure that our step to becoming more efficient and agile does not cause 1,000 other problems down the line?
It’s all in the technology stack you choose. Finding the perfect blend of tools that help you streamline these processes coupled with the agile processes using content reuse will have you at hero status in no time. Bringing on board a single-source authoring solution like MadCap Flare is your way to master the content reuse space. Flare allows you to create content in these snippets of information and customize what is displayed based on audience need and output into different formats, all while maintaining that single source of truth. Now this is a truly simplified explanation of the power of Flare because it does so much more, but content reuse is Flare’s superpower. Content reuse paired with agile learning design and development has never been easier.
About the Author
Andrea Maliska is an award-winning learning and development leader, eLearning strategist and speaker with over fifteen years of experience across multiple industries. She thrives in startup cultures and excels at building out holistic programs that center around the learner experience. She currently owns her own eLearning consulting company, Rebel Learn and is located near the gorgeous Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado.