Learning Blended Learning

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In general terms (and few words), Blended Learning is defined as the combination of traditional face-to-face classroom methods with more modern computer-mediated activities.

Though we may look at blended learning strategies for a variety of primary reasons (from improving the effectiveness of your training initiatives to optimizing costs, to leveraging the synergy of multiple training actors in a community or organization), we all agree that a full blended approach to training is the key to success in every organization addressing change management at any level.
A blended approach guarantees that the right people have access to the right piece of knowledge anytime anywhere, regardless their role in the organization (both internal and external), their duties, their working time and location, the technology they can access.
In a blended approach, assuring consistency of learning content design is key to an effective definition, transfer, assessment and certification of the appropriate learning objectives and outcomes. Classroom-Based (Instructor-Led) Training initiatives cannot be addressed separately from online training and eLearning project without losing a great opportunity to boost the effectiveness of your training processes, and keeping costs for both content production and training delivery significantly higher.

In short, a full blended approach has key advantages for those organizations that need to dramatically reduce the costs and time for creating and maintaining Training materials across several delivery mechanisms and a mixed network of Authors (SMEs, IDs, Trainers).
At the same time, it allows implementing effective Web-Based Training initiatives while still keeping (and improving) Instructor-Led Training initiatives in parallel.

Nowadays, high end authoring tools and learning content management solutions propose, as part of their offering, modules and features that support the production of multiple output materials from one and the same set of source documentation, all produced across one and the same publishing process. This is what we use to call “single source – multiple output” approach.

“Single source – multiple output” approach is needed to those organizations having needs such as:

• reducing the overall investment of the organization in training initiatives, maintaining the effectiveness of the related publishing processes
• leveraging the actual skills of the different actors involved in the above mentioned processes (“SMEs are subject matter experts, IDs and Trainers are instructional and training experts, not the other way around!”)
• building and maintaining a central knowledge hub from which contents may distributed through different channels in an effective and durable way
• as a matter of fact, maximize the re-usability of their contents – see my other post on re-usability of content.

“I don’t want to write, review, translate, and repurpose the same content multiple times!”

In short, a well designed “single source – multiple output” publishing process enables fully blended learning at a reasonable cost.

If the eLearning market had seen in ADL SCORM or IMS Common Cartridge its reference standards, the publishing market has identified in DITA (the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML-based standard introduced by IBM and now maintained by OASIS) the standard modality to structure documentation in a way that “single source – multiple output” can become reality and traditional publishing mechanisms can be kept intact, though extending their scope to also address new media and new distribution channels.

The key component of DITA is its Topics-based authoring paradigm. Indeed, content can be structured into self-standing information chunks, each chunk (or “Topic”, in DITA terms) being the smallest piece of information that can stand for its own. This is possible because every chunk (“Topic”) is organized around a single subject. The length of a Topic may vary from a single short sentence (or word, or image) to a whole paragraph or chapter.

A second key aspect of DITA is its ability to be extended (“specialized”) to cover at best the semantic needs of a specific discipline. DITA specializations already exist for a variety of disciplines including, of course Learning and Training Content (L&TC).

To get an idea of what DITA is all about, you may check the DITA World website, collecting a comprehensive list of DITA resources (articles, vendors, user groups and more).

We plan to address DITA in further posts. Among them:

What happens when DITA meets SCORM? Happy end?

Stay tuned!