The ROI of Reusable Content

Meeting Dynamic Performance Support Requirements
Designing for reusability has another significant advantage in that it allows training organizations to leverage content across geographies, brands, customers and job roles to meet dynamic training requirements. Performance-support guru Dr. Conrad Gottfredson rightfully argues that the training industry is only truly effective at meeting a learner’s first two moments of need: when learning for the first time and when wanting to learn more. He says where the industry falters is delivering on-demand performance-support tools, which are a critical to meet the remaining three moments of need: when trying to remember, when things change and when something goes wrong.

Designing for reusability is the fastest route to meeting these critical performance-support needs. A key element of content reuse is tagging and chunking content so it can be filtered and shared, instead of serving an individual purpose. This drives an entirely new paradigm, one that allows end users to create and customize their own learning experience in the form of courses, procedures, job-aids, check-lists, etc. In this scenario, the cost of customization is negligible as new versions of content are not required. Instead, existing learning objects are simply assembled on-demand based on individual preferences.

Designing for reuse is not applicable to every training situation. However, content reuse is your only road to success if your vision is to:

· Provide a true blended training environment that meets all five moments of need.
· Ensure timeliness and consistency across multiple delivery formats.
· Adapt on demand to different audiences.