Single-Sourcing: Increasing Agility in Your Content Development

In our last blog, we revealed why shifting your tools and processes can have a big impact on the agility of your L&D department. But there’s one essential topic we wanted to explore in a little more detail - single sourcing.

Below, we’re going to dig deeper into what single source content management is, what the benefits are, and how it can become an essential part of your organization.

What is single sourcing?

Put simply, single sourcing allows you to create learning content once and reuse it in many places without increasing effort. For instance, if you’re running a large, complex learning program, you may upload the same document in dozens of different places. Single source content management allows you to upload, reuse, update, and report on the asset from one place - in this case, a learning content management system (LCMS). Additionally, you can publish a single course across multiple channels simultaneously with very little effort, and maintaining multi-channel content is just as easy.

The benefits of single sourcing for content

The main benefits of adopting single source authoring is that your L&D team will reduce errors and save a significant amount of time. Instead of reuploading the same file into different courses, ending up with multiple variations of assets that become out of date and difficult to remedy, you can quickly make sweeping changes to courses containing the asset. This allows you to focus on collaborating with your team on required QA and approvals to push the learning content live across all your platforms with greater agility.

Single source authoring also means you can ensure the consistency of your content, as you will have one version of each asset, and each instance will be updated at once instead of being a manual task. This becomes critical when it comes to any compliance-related content that requires updates to align them with new rules and regulations.

It also empowers you to quickly scale your learning content management processes, as you can review, upload, and update content once to keep your entire program fresh and up to date.