Takeaways from TechLearn 2023

Our team taught and learned so much during TechLearn 2023. Here are some insights from our test kitchen demonstration, the L&D healthcare series, and more! 

(Warning: Images of delicious New Orleans food will make you envious.)

Innovations in Training Test Kitchen

This was a dynamic way to experience technical innovations in the world of learning and training, and the attendees eagerly participated. A special thank you to Phylise Banner and Hector Valle for organizing this event!

How it worked 

1. Participants would hunt for “ingredients” for their learning and training “recipes” by finding a table and listening to the table presenters’ demonstration. 
2. Presenters had 10 minutes to demonstrate a product or concept as a potential “ingredient.”
3. After the demo was done, the participants had five minutes to find a new table. 
4. After six rounds of demos were completed, participants chose three “ingredients” to create their full “recipe” for success!

The future of learning content with Content as a Service (CaaS)

For our test kitchen, Alan Pringle demonstrated the concept of Content as a Service (CaaS). We did not demo products or software, because as content strategy consultants, Scriptorium only provides services (and we don’t resell software either, to be sure you get unbiased advice).

So, how did we demonstrate a concept rather than a product? With chocolate, of course! 

Alan started each demo by asking participants for a particular piece of content that’s commonly used in their organization. Examples included login procedures, housekeeping tasks for a class, and more. He then picked up a single piece of chocolate with a brown wrapper.

“This piece of chocolate represents that piece of content. What happens when you need to include it in other places?’

Alan then picked up more and more pieces of chocolate with brown wrappers.

“In a lot of organizations, that means copying and pasting that bit of content over and over and over. Now, which one is your single source of truth? What happens when you need to make an update to this piece of content with all this copy and paste? You have to find each instance and make the changes there.”

Next, Alan grabbed chocolates with yellow and orange wrappers. 

“Let’s make things more complicated. What happens when you need slight variations of this content to account for a different audience or for different delivery targets: for example an online course vs. a printed study guide?

This copying and pasting and trying to maintain multiple versions and variants is not sustainable. At Scriptorium, we partner with organizations to clean up their content operations—the way they create and distribute content.”

“This copying and pasting and trying to maintain multiple versions and variants is not sustainable. At Scriptorium, we partner with organizations to clean up their content operations—the way they create and distribute content.”

— Alan Pringle 

Here’s our one-minute video that ran in the background during Alan’s test kitchen: 

For more resources on improving content operations for your learning content, check out our learning content resources page. 

L&D lessons from healthcare series

On Wednesday and Thursday, we heard from amazing panelists during this unique healthcare series focused on empowering training staff, systems and processes, technology, and more. 

Janet Zarecor (Director of Clinical Systems Education at Mayo Clinic) and Chuck Sigmund (President of ProMobile BI) did a wonderful job hosting this panel and leading the lively discussions. 

During these discussions, both the presenters and the participants demonstrated a strong passion for removing friction and creating opportunities for learning and training to be more applicable and accessible to their teams. 

Beignets

Lastly, we had to make an all-important scenic stop to review a critical piece of material: authentic New Orleans beignets from Café Du Monde.

We’d like to say a huge thank you to Steve Dahlberg and the rest of the TechLearn 2023 team for making it such a pleasure to be part of this event. If you missed TechLearn 2023, we hope to see you in February at Training 2024! 

More questions about CaaS or content operations? Contact our team today.