How Content Curation Improves Training Development
Matt Archer
October 15, 2021
What is Content Curation?
Content Curation is the act of researching, and collecting specific information and content from various sources that fit a need, and then aggregating it into a form that can be easily consumed to fill that need and add value to the learning experience.
Content Curation is often utilized in social media to help teams distribute regular, relevant content for their followers without needing to invest large amounts of time creating all that content themselves from scratch.
This same methodology can be applied to creating training, whether it be eLearning, or Instructor-Led Training to save time and money while also creating a customized, interesting, and relevant learning experience for your audience.
What is the Difference Between Content Curation and Creation?
Content Creation involves researching the subject matter you wish to create the content from, either by meeting with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to extract the necessary information, or by doing traditional research through reading articles, or other documents. From there, you often create a design outline, and then start developing the content from scratch based on the information you gathered.
Content Curation allows you to take existing content that you want to use, aggregate it, and then distill it into the parts you feel are most useful to build around. You can then customize and personalize the content to fit the needs of your learners, while adding or subtracting elements if needed.
In a way, Content Creation is like building a house from a blueprint, while Content Curation is like going to a factory to select a pre-fabricated house. In both cases you’ll still be decorating the house (customizing the content of the training), but curation saves a lot of time and money by skipping the more detailed steps of the design process.
How Curation Can Improve Training Development
There are several ways that incorporating Content Curation into your development can improve your training compared to solely using Content Creation.
Reduces Development Time
Curation can streamline the initial phases of the training development process by cutting down the amount of time that you need to research topics, analyze the process being trained on, and work with the SME to develop the ideas that will eventually turn into learning objectives.
Why re-invent the wheel if someone else has already done most of the legwork? Taking existing content and customizing it to your audience can save tons of development time (and money) while still being able to provide the quality and relevancy your learners need.
Allows Learners to See Issues from Multiple Viewpoints
Because curated content is often obtained from multiple sources (which should be carefully distilled into only the best and most relevant offerings), it presents the opportunity for trainers to provide the same information to learners from multiple viewpoints.
This can provide a broader perspective, and encourage the development of critical thinking, which is an invaluable learning skill.
Provides Regular Flow of Customized Relevant Content
Curation helps learners by providing them with only the information that is most applicable to them in a way that’s easy to navigate and find what they need.
This also helps trainers because creating content is often time-intensive so it can be difficult to keep the content flowing on a regular basis. Curation provides a wealth of content that you can sift through and dispense as needed.
By curating relevant content, you’re able to drip content more easily to your learners (through methods such as micro-learning modules), which means they get regular, relevant learning that helps them with what they need when they need it.
Final Thoughts
Positive Results™ is a training development and cloud solutions company that helps organizations by analyzing their business processes and customizing training and tools to solve for any gaps we find.
We feel that content curation, when done effectively, can greatly improve the training development process by saving time and money while increasing the relevance of the content for the learners. As content curation continues to become more popular, we recommend considering this option when developing training for your team or clients.
If you have additional questions or need support, contact us at:
Positive Results™ Custom Business Solutions
440.499.4944
Sources:
https://www.virtual-college.co.uk/resources/content-creation-vs-content-curation-in-e-learning
https://elearningindustry.com/7-tips-curate-amazing-elearning-content
https://www.td.org/atd-blog/the-future-of-l-d-5-learning-trends-for-2021
