How Can You Use Content Curation In Your L&D Strategy?

What Is Content Curation?

Content curation could mean different things to different people. Our definition is based on its relevance to learners and the impact it can create for business.

We define content curation as an exercise to continually find, filter (group, organize), and share the most relevant content on specific topics and offer it to learners as an online tool or through a portal or platform.

What Are The Benefits That Content Curation Offers And How Can It Enhance Your Existing Learning Strategy?

Content curation can add value to your learning strategy and enhance the impact manifold as it helps you:

• Aggregate meaningful content.
  With content curation, you can gather and organize all relevant online and offline resources in your network and help your learners access them all in one place.
• Empower your Learning and Development team and learners alike.
  Content curation allows both Learning and Development experts and learners to generate and curate content and make contextual learning material available for everyone’s benefit.
• Motivate your learners.
  With content curation, you can enable employees to get recognized and rewarded for their contribution, effective usage, and learning achievements.
• Encourage learning as a continuum.
  Content curation will help your learners experience constant learning through forums, discussions, and chats for peer level collaboration. It also provides the choice for learners to build paths and share content. Furthermore, it facilitates creation of strong relationships between experts and learners.
• Provide personalized feedback through analytics.
  Through some smart data analytics, the solution can provide personalized recommendations/feedback to learners as to what content they should go through.

Why Should You Adopt It?

While formal and structured learning approaches will continue to be revered in Learning circles, there is a growing sense of consensus with regard to they being less appealing to modern-day learners. The reasons are many – longer development time, longer seat times, limited learner participation, higher development costs, time consuming update processes, and so on to mention a few.

Content curation appeals to today’s generation of learners who are accustomed to looking up information on the Internet.

It resonates with today’s learners due to the following factors:

• Focused.
  Although the information that learners get through content curation is dynamic, it is filtered and just what they want, mapping precisely to their needs.
• Continuous value enhancement.
  Filtering of information by experts notwithstanding, learners get to play an equally important role in curating content and making the content repository richer.
• Social learning and performance gain.
  When today’s learners find a useful piece of information, they tend to share that information with others. Content curation allows them to share content with others, thereby creating a larger learning audience.
• Changing the learning culture.
  Content curation can serve the purpose of creating a culture of learning as a continuum really well.

What Are The Steps Involved In Content Curation?

For your content curation exercise to be beneficial, you need to follow these steps:

1. Find the most suitable content from different sources (both from external sources and your existing repository).
2. Filter it so that learners only get to see content that’s relevant to them.
3. Share the content found at the right time through the right platform.
4. Add value to that content with additional inputs, context, or commentary.
5. Tag and archive information, which is vital in ensuring its usage in future. (Consistency in tagging is very important. Often, there could be multiple people involved in an aggregation exercise but they should adhere to identical guidelines to tag the resources).
6. Take feedback from learners to assess the relevance, usage, and the impact.

Are There Any Best Practices To Maximize The Content Curation Impact?

You can enhance the impact of your curated content by following a few simple practices:

1. Seek validation from learners.
   While the process of curation would have gone through the rigor to secure the content that is relevant for the learners, it is important to validate this with them. Create channels to seek your learners’ opinion and feedback, validate them against your assumptions, and make the required changes.
2. Integrate the curated content into online courses.
   The engagement of learners tends to end with completion of an online course. You can extend this by providing a supporting Webliography or Resources (outside of the eLearning course). You can further extend this to ensure that this continues to be enriched by learners through their ongoing contribution to it.
3. Endeavor to create a self-sustainable learning ecosystem.
   Often, great ideas tend to start on a high note and lose sheen in the long run. By creating “communities of interest/practice” and ensuring that your content is being updated by learners, you can create a sustainable learning ecosystem.
4. Continuous improvement to refine your strategies.
   Take feedback and continuously checkpoint the usage. These cues will provide the required insight to improve and retain learners’ interest.

Case Study

Now, I share a case study that will help you understand how you can use content curation in your organization.

Our content curation approach is based on a dedicated learning portal featuring multiple learning paths. We have integrated aspects of social learning, gamification, and personalization to support the organization’s 70/20/10 learning model.

Key Highlights

• The platform allows learners to create their own profile and select topics of their choice.
• It then recommends personalized learning paths based on the areas of interest chosen by them.
• Learners can view recommended assets based on their browsing patterns and trending topics.
• The solution offers social recommendations to learners with the option for them to share the content.
• Gamification elements come in the form of points gained, achievements, badges for accomplishments, and so on.
• The platform also offers insightful analytics for admins to assess the browsing patterns of learners and make the learning more personalized for them.

Take a look at this video to see how this solution works and the kind of impact it can create on the learning:

I hope this article provides the required insights on content curation (its definition, benefits, and how it can be used practically). If you have any queries, do contact me at apandey@eidesign.net.

Also Read:

• Why You Should Use Content Curation To Support Your Corporate Training – 5 Questions Answered