Ebrahim Mookhtiar - 07-Mar-2019

“The world keeps changing. Knowledge degrades quickly. Learners need to be engaged and learn continuously”, quotes Stephen Walsh, a co-founder of Anders Pink, a curation company. He strongly believed that, “content curation matters”. He also explains that since, “most new developments, ideas, research, product launches, case studies, and discussions take place outside your organization. Learners need access to external content to stay updated. It’s part of the continuous learning process.”

What is Content Curation?

We are aware that in today’s day and age there is a vast plethora of content on the internet which is available at lightning speed. But abundant content and speed does not always mean that the search result has accuracy and depth. At this stage, the content curator identifies the most relevant information on a particular subject for a set target audience by contextualizing and organizing it before presenting it to them.

Digital curation is nothing but a process that helps seek out new ideas, place them in context and share the findings with the audience. Harold Jarche calls this “Seeking, Sensing, Sharing”. The content curator goes through multiple sources (seeks); finds the best external content and filters the content by checking its authenticity (senses); and eventually, shares it with the target audience on the right platform (shares).

That’s what the world is today! The solution lies in empowering the workforce to curate for themselves. The workforce includes employees, internal thought leaders and influencers sharing materials with one another. Allison Anderson and Ben Betts, in their book ‘Ready, Set, Curate: 8 Learning Experts Tell You How’ wrote that “curated insights represent a ‘learning locker,’ allowing for both reflection and a demonstration of what they know”. It allows the learners “to contribute in these ways makes creating and maintaining a curated list of resources much more efficient”.

Creating Content v/s Content Curation

The world is moving at an alarming rate. Mankind is making constant progress. Every field has some development or the other on almost a day-to-day basis. For example, the RBI, in brief intervals, makes changes to its policies or there is a new drug invented in a scientific lab. If companies create content, the learner is stuck with the same content till it’s updated in the LMS. On the other hand, content curation allows the learner to view updated information at any time. Hence, instead of developing your own content, it’s better to curate content!

ICOG is an Assisted Learning Intelligence (ALI) platform that solves the problem of content curation. It helps organizations align Learning and Development activities to business goals and empowers them in creating a truly knowledge driven organization thereby, increasing the Learning Index. It helps individuals take charge of their personal development based on their preferences, by pin-pointing highly curated content from the Web and Enterprise.

Content Curation Strategies

Curating content from a plethora of information is not easy. There are some proven strategies that have worked while curating content:

Give the Learners the Control: Let the learners take the lead by giving them the power to vote or rate the content. Ensure that the most voted and the most rated content gets visibility so that more learners know about it.

Build a Resource Page: Create a content curated resource page that directs the learners to additional information. These links could be internal or external that delivers trustworthy content to the learner.

Stay Updated: Evolve continuously by staying updated about information on evolving business needs, changing training requirements, marketing trends, multimedia, content management and delivery trends.

Create a Knowledge Portal: Invite the learners to a knowledge portal by designing the content like an e-learning course which actually works like a content management system. It guides the learners through a database of curated content based on the subject, job responsibilities and department.

Measuring How Content Curation Can Enhance Your Existing Learning Strategy

You can add value to your learning strategy and increase the impact with the help on content curation platforms like ICOG, as mentioned before. Let’s take a look at a few benefits:

Gathering and organizing relevant online and offline material is possible while curating content. All of this content can be kept for learners in one place for easy access.

Empowering the Learning and Development team to generate and curate content and make contextual learning material available for everybody.

Motivating, recognizing and rewarding the contribution of employees who contribute learning material and share content.

Encouraging learning as a continuum through forums, discussions and chats with colleagues and establish strong relationships between learners and experts.

Personalizing feedback and providing recommendations to learners on the kind of content they can go through for better and in-depth understanding.

For instance, a platform like ICOG can help learners connect with a Virtual Coach or a Subject Matter Expert to get guidance, on the go! It also provides data driven actionable insights and intuitive dashboards at all levels in the organization. It also helps the SMEs to measure the proficiency of the learners and know their abilities and potential.

Why is Content Curation Appealing to Gen Y?

In 2016, a study by Degreed found that 47% learners turn towards the internet to search for answers whereas, only 28% use their employer’s LMS. It’s not that there is no content on the LMS, but that the content is not organized or curated effectively. Modern day learners find formal and structured learning approaches less appealing. There are a lot of hindrances while creating an online learning course; they include investment of time and resources, long seat times, limited learner participation and going through irrelevant content. Today’s youngsters prefer learning by checking the internet using precise key words.

So, content curation resonates with today’s learners due to the following reasons:

Mapping Required Content: Although the information that the learners get through content curation is dynamic, it is sieved. The learners can map the content as per their needs.

Content Repository: Learners and experts can update information in the system which makes it a pool of knowledge for any learner who wants reference material. This kind of exchange of information makes the content repository richer.

Tag and Archive Information: Learners can tag and archive information for future use as per the guidelines. The guidelines ensure that different content curators use specific words to tag the content, so that it is easily found by the learners.

Self-Sustained Learning Ecosystem: Content curation creates a self-sustainable learning ecosystem when communities and groups constantly keep the information updated in these repositories for the learner to access at any point of time.

Conclusion:

The Learning Management System is of use only if it is backed up by good content. If the learner is supposed to go through poorly organized content, his learning experience is not going to lead to any benefit. Hence, you must build an effective learning program with organized content so that the learners can search for content that they are looking for and curate it to meet the training needs of the company. Remember, “Mindfully created content is the ultimate goal!”