RSS for Instructional Designers
I was at a client meeting the other day where the topic of discussion was “multi-channel delivery of learning content”. The client has a legacy collection of audio and video learning objects that it wants to make available to employees on an on-demand basis. I suggested that the client could group the learning objects into a series of topic areas based on job performance competencies. Employees could then select which topic areas they were interested in and have a tailored selection of content delivered to them via a personalized RSS feed.
I noticed some eyes start to glaze over at this point as we continued to discuss how we could set up an RSS feed to deliver learning content. The room seemed to be divided into 2 camps. Those that knew what an RSS feed was (me and one other guy). And everyone else in the room.
I should have shown everyone this clear and simple explanation of RSS brought to you by the good people at Commoncraft. Here is “RSS in Plain English”
After watching this video you will know all about RSS. Now let’s start getting that learning content out there!
Perhaps consider how meta tagging the A/V content will simplify the creation of content ‘buckets’ via whatever delivery system is being used (XML something, LMS or other). We just took over 1,000 hours of client video (tape based), although the digitizing was plenty of work, the tagging component was perhaps underestimated. Best to do that first IMHO.