Learning Content Development: The Agile Way With Xyleme

Note from InfoPro Learning: We are not affiliated with Xyleme and did not receive any compensation for this article. Our team uses various L&D technologies and we encourage open and honest reviews to provide better insight to our customers, colleagues, and peers in the industry.

“Content is king.” We have heard this phrase time and again. Considering the dynamic business environment, content is one of the biggest assets that many companies strive to manage. With continuously evolving technology, we have a fleet of powerful content authoring and publishing tools at our disposal. These powerful tools help us to manage, reuse, and repurpose content in an Agile way. One of the many tools that we use is the Xyleme Learning Content Management System (LCMS) for rapid content development and reuse.

Xyleme LCMS (Xyleme) is an efficient single-source LCMS that provides the flexibility to work cohesively with our geographically dispersed team of instructional designers, subject matter experts, and customers. Xyleme not only eases the pace for content development, but also reduces the development time and effort. It is the most effective tool to create sharable, reusable, dynamic, and measurable content.

How does the Xyleme LCMS enable Agile content development?

With our project management and execution process going Agile, it is important to ensure agility in the way we develop our content. Let us explore how Xyleme helps to marry our project management methodology with our content development process.

• • Quick and Easy: Agile literally means to be able to move quickly and easily. Xyleme is a 100% XML Rich Content Editor, which helps create content faster than ever before. More importantly, the pre-defined templates help to reduce the overall development time.

• • Incremental and Iterative: Agile focuses on incremental development in fixed iterations, also referred to as sprints. The idea is to have multiple cycles of Plan-Do-Check-Act before a release. Xyleme allows us to create content incrementally because it has an open structure. This enables the addition of components to our courses anytime and with ease.

• • Collaborative: Agile encourages daily interaction and collaboration between members involved in the process. Xyleme fosters communication and collaboration between instructional designers, subject matter experts, and reviewers to ensure that the content is current at all times.

Our Project Management team also uses Xyleme for planning and tracking the training development projects using workflows and task planners. The Project Management team utilizes Xyleme reports for enhancing project visibility, mitigating risks, ensuring impactful reviews, and so on. These reports are periodically shared with our customers ensure transparency.

With Xyleme, we are flexible… we are fluid… we are Agile!

How is Xyleme an instructional designer’s best friend?

The Instructional Design team at InfoPro Learning uses Xyleme to create content for several customers and listed below are the benefits we reap.

• • Store all the training content and assets.
    Xyleme helps to store all the training content and assets under one roof for ready retrieval and reuse.

• • Create training content in different formats from one source.
    Xyleme supports single-source publishing, wherein multiple outputs can be produced from one source (one source many outputs). This essentially means that instructional designers can create content once and publish it to various modalities such as instructor-led training, web-based training, virtual classroom training, mLearning nuggets, eBooks, and many others formats, including responsive design outputs.

• • Reuse content by utilizing the shared document and media library.
    Xyleme offers a shared document and media library. Instructional designers can reuse content, images, and audio/sound effects from the library by dragging and dropping them into a course. This helps speed-up the overall development process and maintain consistency across modules/courses.

• • Create personalized learning for multiple target groups.
    A very useful feature of Xyleme is content metadata. Xyleme enables the addition of metadata or design data to content at the most granular level. This information can be used to publish multiple versions of the same course for different user profiles and helps to make the content searchable.

• • Build interactive content with a wide variety of templates.
    Xyleme includes a wide range of predefined templates that the instructional designers can use to create content easily, without concern regarding formatting or aspects of functionality. The use of standardized templates also helps to maintain a consistent look and feel across modules and courses. We can create custom templates, if required.

• • Track content review in the published output.
    The Review engine in Xyleme is a game-changer for our instructional design reviewers and subject matter experts because they can review the same piece of content simultaneously. Xyleme sends separate instances of the same piece of content to different reviewers and all they need to do is click the link and add comments. Once content is released for review, it is no longer editable, so no changes can be made to it until the review is complete.

• • Easily reorganize content within a course.
    Xyleme helps us restructure content within a course by dragging and dropping the required elements to appropriate locations. This helps to keep the structure fluid and make changes quickly and easily.

• • Leverage legacy content to create new content.
    Xyleme provides an amazing import functionality, which allows importing content from multiple formats like, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, HTML, and make it available for use. It also saves media elements from these formats into the media library.

• • Maintain versions of content and output.

    Xyleme provides advanced versioning functionality. As instructional designers, all we need to do is check-in and check-out the learning objects to maintain versions. Once a version is saved, it can be opened, viewed, compared with other versions, or rolled back to a previous version.

So, if content is king, Xyleme is undoubtedly one of the safest abodes for the king.

If you are wondering whether Xyleme is the right solution for your training requirements, please reach out to us. Our team has used virtually every LCMS on the market today and since we refuse compensation from the providers, we can provide a truly unbiased perspective.