5 Ways to Reuse eLearning Content in dominKnow | ONE

Paul Schneider, PhD

December 29, 2022

6 minutes

Recently, we talked about how dominKnow | ONE helps you make the most of reusable eLearning content. There are a lot of ways our eLearning content reuse features can help you save time and money, but there are five common use cases that we see.

Distribution to Multiple Brands

Let's start with one of the most straightforward forms of content customization in dominKnow | ONE: identical content dressed up in multiple themes.

In a previous article, we discussed how the style and substance are stored separately in dominKnow | ONE, which allows you to reuse content without manual reformatting.

dominKnow | ONE's reusable themes are highly customizable. Whether you start from a system theme or build one from scratch, you have all the options required to reflect your organization's branding. Then, you can essentially apply the skin to your content.

That makes it a snap to develop, distribute, and update a single course with several different looks and feels – whether you're an internal L&D team that serves common content to multiple brands or an eLearning contractor white labeling your courses for multiple clients.

Legal or Regulatory Localization

Regulatory training – whether you're talking about harassment, occupational safety, or food hygiene – often has multiple layers of content determined by jurisdiction. Typically, there are basic concepts that everyone needs to learn, the overarching regulations they must follow, and the local regulations that apply.

If you operate in multiple jurisdictions across a single country, the "universal" content may include the conceptual stuff and national regulations, but content will vary by local jurisdiction (state/commonwealth/province or smaller).

If you operate internationally, then you may need three or more levels.

Regardless of the scale, this is where dominKnow | ONE's reusable Learning Objects (LOs) come into play. LOs give you a tidy way to bundle learning content and assessment questions into a single unit for easy reuse and recombination.

Perhaps as an international organization, you organize a regulatory topic around four LOs: general concepts, international law, national regulations, and local. To the learner, these can be combined into a seamless learning experience, including, if you choose, a single comprehensive final assessment. They won't have to know that the content is segmented on the backend, but you'll still get the benefits of easier management through Learning Object reuse.

Functional or Role-Based Customization

Audience targeting isn't unique to jurisdictional issues. Many training topics require some information that's relevant to everyone in your organization and some that's necessary based on the learner's division, department, area of expertise, or role.

It's likely that one or more shared LOs will come in handy for reusing chunks of content applicable to all or part of your organization. Think: an introduction, background information, organization-wide policy, or a roll-out timeline.

However, dominKnow | ONE supports more granular types of content reuse that you can leverage within the more targeted content.

Say you're training an entire organization on a new product. Your sales and tech support teams will need to learn the product from very different angles, but there will be content overlap. You may need to teach all teams about the same features but highlight different takeaways or discuss different role-based scenarios.

This is where other reusable eLearning content can come into play, like graphics, video, audio, linked documents, glossary items, and references or citations. Shared content can be embedded into each team's customized content to illustrate concepts that are relevant to everyone. Later, you'll be able to edit that shared content in one place for global updates – including its metadata and supporting pieces like transcripts or closed caption files.

Formal and Informal Learning

Almost every organization can benefit from maintaining at least two formats for most topics – formal and informal learning.

After all, there are five moments of need in any learning process, and formal eLearning content can only meet two of them. Inevitably, your learners will need to access the same information again as they use those skills or products, problem-solve, and navigate changing processes.

You can ask them to dig back into your LMS and find what they're looking for, but you're creating an artificial barrier. It's even worse if your formal learning is in a traditional, fixed-pixel format in a world where everyone first reaches for their smartphone. No one wants to log into a rarely used system, locate the right course, squint at tiny text on their mobile screen, and skip through a bunch of other content to find the three sentences they're looking for. They'll probably make up their own answer or ask the internet before they bother.

If, on the other hand, you give them easy access to a mobile-friendly searchable knowledge base with all the same content as their formal courses, they're much more likely to reference and follow the training you spent good time and money building them.

In dominKnow | ONE, you can easily reuse LOs, media, and more to build both formal and informal learning on the same topics with very little extra effort. When you author in our responsive mode, Flow, everything you create will appear native on all devices. You can use or adapt existing Flow themes to make a formal course, a knowledge base, and a tutorial site, among other things.

Spaced Repetition and Retrieval Practice

Spaced repetition and distributed retrieval practice have a well-documented success record for moving information into long-term memory.

Some learning objectives have built-in triggers for spaced repetition, as we discussed above. A certain time of need will organically prompt your learners to seek out the information and refresh their own memory. Performance support resources fill that need perfectly.

Unfortunately, this mechanism doesn't kick in for everything you need your learners to retain and apply. Some things are easier out of sight and out of mind. Many compliance topics fall into this blind spot.

You need your learners to recall and comply with these regulations, but many won't voluntarily revisit the material. With dominKnow | ONE's content reuse features, you can quickly create short follow-up refreshers for the most crucial points.

When you reuse a Learning Object in a new project, it's possible to make use of the content without the assessment questions or the assessment questions without the content. You can also choose to include all the LO's questions, or you can pull random questions from the LO's pool.

Here's an example of how you can put these settings to work. Learners take a formal course composed of a few different LOs, only one of which is absolutely critical for them to retain. A few weeks later, they're prompted to play a quiz game that draws questions from the critical LO. If they score well, that's that. If they score poorly, you can prompt them to take a short course that reviews the material.

You can also repurpose certain assets from a formal course such as microlearning. Maybe they're required to re-watch a video with the important points, or you present an existing infographic with a short quiz afterward. The possibilities are endless.