The road towards content agility is rather agile in itself. It requires a brand-new approach. How to go from a linear to a modular view?
In our previous blog post, we've discussed the importance of content agility. But how to arrive at agile content? The road towards it is rather agile in itself. Today, we will walk you through the three major stages of an agile process: production, management, and distribution.
1. Production: creating individual content units
Authors tend to write books from A to Z. Even if they work on chapters in a non-chronological order, the process is linear — they deliver the book after they've written all pages. When creating agile content, it's crucial to adopt a brand-new perspective. Content agility implies that you should consider each piece of content as a standalone learning object or content unit. This modular view will allow you to divide longer works into separate parts, which you can mix up and re-use in accordance with students' needs — at some point, chapter two from book A and chapter four from book B might be the combination an individual student is looking for.
This approach affects the production stage. Creating content now resembles building a software product in an agile manner: you write and publish content in iterations, delivering individual pages or chapters. You don't wait until a book-length work is finished, as each content unit is valuable in itself.
2. Management: classifying content units using metadata
All those separate content units should be stored in the right way. Publishers used to have pallets of books, but now they need to set up a warehouse for a myriad of pages that can be combined into countless 'dynamic books.' How to manage these assets?
Let's draw the comparison with software development again, where agile teams can add pieces of code to a repository. The latter is similar to a publisher's content management system (CMS) containing learning materials (content units). The keyword here is 'classification' — if classified correctly using metadata, all these separate components will remain organised, and the CMS is the perfect 'warehouse' for agile content.
3. Distribution: compiling and sharing personalised content in real time
In the 'olden days,' pallets of books were shipped to students at the start of each school year. That's no longer the case, as publishers can now put together and distribute content in real time.
Personalisation is essential in this regard: it's possible to adapt content to an individual student's current needs. When a teacher or student specifies what they require, publishers can compile tailored content (using the metadata in their CMS) and share the resulting agile content right away.
Rolling out agile content: getting off to a good start
Those who decide to go down the agile road need a solid CMS that can serve as a foundation for rolling out agile content. Fortunately, most modern content aggregation companies already use such systems. Their next step is to develop an agile process and integrate metadata!
Want to learn more about how to implement content agility? In our upcoming blog post, we’ll discuss why automation is the publisher’s next step after digitalisation.