Printer Friendly Version

Anyone who has set foot in a modern university classroom or lecture hall knows the good old-fashioned chalkboard is headed the way of the good old-fashioned eight-track cassette. With the introduction of audio, video and closed-circuit television to the campus, the traditional classroom isn't looking very traditional.

One problem with the reliance on rich content is its accessibility outside the classroom. A pilot program at the University of Michigan is attempting to build a solution complicated enough to let teachers and students have their own online workspace where they would store rich content ranging from slides for an art history class to video of a dental procedure for the dental school. At the same time, the designers of the system want an interface as simple to use as PowerPoint.

The ultimate goal is a system that lets people input video using a hardware/software appliance like those available from Telestream or another vendor. The system would know from a log-in who the user is and in which folder to put the content. The text of speech would become part of content's meta data, making it searchable and doing away with hunting through audio and video looking for the relevant sound bite. End-users would need only a Web browser to peruse their rich media collections.

If it sounds complicated, that's because it is. There is no out-of-the-box solution for such a project, and there isn't even much of a roadmap to follow. The project at Michigan grew out of a desire to take 50,000 hours of video from the school's television station, archive it and make it searchable. When the idea expanded beyond its more traditional TV roots, the university went through a formal RFP process, much like a corporation, and ended up choosing IBM and Ancept (since acquired by Stellent) to help build the digital asset management project.

The pilot project is funded for the next two years, and in that time the answers to some pretty pressing questions will have to be found before Michigan knows if it actually has a workable solution on its hands. A way to provide access control for potentially as many as 75,000 users has to be found; storage for all that rich content has to be found somewhere in the university's distributed computing environment; and rights issues with the content itself will likely have to be resolved.

As an institution of higher education, the University of Michigan has benefitted from IBM's willingness to help with the costs of licenses and hardware grants. If the project flies, both the school and IBM will benefit from a solution that makes managing rich media in such a distributed environment a reality.

"The way we work with rich media now is the way households managed water in the 18th century," said John Williams, associate director of Michigan's Media Union and director of the digital media tools lab. "Now we have indoor plumbing."

But what if you aren't likely to get help from one of the biggest names in technology, or you aren't a major research university with 75,000 users that need access to your educational content? As the technologies for content management have evolved, from Web content management to document management to the enigmatic "knowledge management," the goal has been to make the information within organizations more accessible. Whether it's in a strict e-learning environment or an informal information session, content management and collaboration technologies have all in a sense become solutions for learning.

"Knowledge is a key economic asset," said Kevin Lynch, vice president of e-learning and collaboration at Macromedia, adding that the advantage goes to those can quickly acquire, store and disseminate knowledge.

The original learning management systems (LMS) were developed to automate the administration of learning. They served as strategic planning and management systems for organizations' education efforts. While an LMS could help with managing and acquiring e-learning content, its use did not mean an organization was implementing an actual e-learning initiative because an LMS can be used to manage classroom training and materials.

Systems with the ability to design, create, deliver and measure e-learning initiatives have come to be known as learning content management systems (LCMS). Most of the new LCMS offerings have the ability to support reusable learning objects, and a standard known as Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM) has been developed to enable Web-based learning systems to import, share and re-use learning objects. For some, the terms LMS and LCMS and their definitions are interchangeable. Others find neither acronym entirely appropriate. That's why the introduction of technical standards like SCORM will be welcome in the e-learning community.

"I think what you saw in the market is they started to merge together," said Macromedia's Lynch. "We see a need for content and collaboration coming together."

Regardless of what you call the software you use to manage them, Lynch said there are three broad categories of learning content based on the urgency of the information that needs to be learned: a) develop skills and competencies; b) critical knowledge transfer; and c) information broadcast. Critical knowledge transfer and information broadcasts involve rapid e-learning, which needs they are high-volume applications and need some type of content management to facilitate their use, according to Lynch.

Macromedia, which is well-known for its design software such as Dreamweaver and Fireworks, has been in the e-learning market for more than 10 years with its Authorware product, a desktop application that creates rich media e-learning content for distribution on the Web, intranets or CDs. With its Breeze product, which delivers rich multimedia presentation, has stuck another finger in the e-learning pie.

Breeze consists of three components: the presentation platform; an optional training module that tracks the results of quizzes and surveys to the individual level; and Breeze Live, which delivers e-meeting-type content. If your e-learning challenge consists of educating your salesforce about a new channel, an application like Breeze may be all you need.

"We're offering a mini-LMS or skinny LMS," Lynch said. Users can edit the audio in a Breeze presentation and use shared spaces to exchange content. Breeze is built to distribute content with a short shelf life, where there's no need for the functionality and cost of a more complicated content management system. Macromedia does make adapters, however, so Breeze can be used as part of a larger LMS.

Lynch admits that no single e-learning solution is good for every potential use. For keeping your sales team up to date, Breeze can do the job, but you wouldn't want to use it to train pilots to fly a jet airplane.

According to Bersin & Associates, e-learning technology and implementation consultants, 50 percent or more of the learning problems in most corporations can be met with so-called "rapid e-learning solutions" like Macromedia's Breeze. If it's just the broadcast of new information, teaching employees to fill out new HR forms, for example, and tracking and interaction aren't called for, corporations can use an application already found on most desktops — PowerPoint.

More complicated e-learning initiatives that require tracking the progress of end-users for a certification; individualized content development; and integration with other back-end systems such as ERP will require an LCMS.

A quality LCMS will handle content development, include administrative functions such as class enrollment, support reusable learning objects, have enterprise-level security and support communication and collaboration as part of the e-learning process.

Massood Zarrabian, the CEO of OutStart, a Boston-based learning application vendor, has a problem with the term "learning content management system," even though his company markets a couple of products that fall under that description.

"The creation of that word has created problems in the marketplace," Zarrabian said. He prefers to think of e-learning management as business process re-engineering, rather than traditional content management.

Zarrabian said there are two views of e-learning in the marketplace. The first is a method of online learning that is very WYSIWYG-oriented. Authors of the content define the content and page layout, and usually have subject matter expertise or are working with someone who does.

The second view is the learning object management model, where lessons are assembled and personalized using a bottom-up model. It is more conducive to creating multiple forms of the content for distribution over different media. It also brings with it higher start-up costs.

With its Studio and Evolution products, OutStart offers applications that cater to each model. According to Zarrabian, certain industries whose e-learning initiatives have matured, such as financial services, or those with a lot of content and constituents, tend to favor the learning object model, which Zarrabian expects to be the surviving e-learning model in the long run.

Zarrabian relates the future of e-learning management applications to a lesson that retailers learned during the dot-com boom. Many retailers established separate online and offline business applications, such as CRM, Zarrabian said. But eventually the retailers that survived had to bring their online and offline systems together because customers did wanted consistency in their interactions with the brand.

By using a learning object management model, e-learning content is essentially the same but can be customized depending on its delivery and method and end-user, which sounds a lot like traditional content management.