At LavaCon 2025, we investigated the impossible dream of customer content, uncovered the potential of structured learning content, and shared solutions to make sure your content doesn’t sleep with the fishes—or the whale sharks.
AI, self-paced courses, and shifting demand for instructor-led classes—what’s next for the future of training content? In this podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Kevin Siegel unpack the challenges, opportunities, and what it takes to adapt.
There’s probably a training company out there that’d be happy to teach me how to use WordPress. I didn’t have the time, I didn’t have the resources, nothing. So I just did it on my own. That’s one example of how you can use AI to replace some training. And when I don’t know how to do something these days, I go right to YouTube and look for a video to teach me how to do it. But given that, there are some industries where you can’t get away with that. Healthcare is an example—you’re not going to learn how to do brain surgery that someone could rely on with AI or through a YouTube video.
— Kevin Siegel
What if you could escape copy-and-paste and build dynamic learning experiences at scale? In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Mike Buoy explore the benefits of structured learning content. They share how organizations can break down silos between techcomm and learning content, deliver content across channels, and support personalized learning experiences at scale.
The good thing about structured authoring is that you have a structure. If this is the concept that we need to talk about and discuss, here’s all the background information that goes with it. With that structure comes consistency, and with that consistency, you have more of your information and knowledge documented so that it can then be distributed and repackaged in different ways. If all you have is a PowerPoint, you can’t give somebody a PowerPoint in the middle of an oil change and say, “Here’s the bare minimum you need,” when I need to know, “Okay, what do I do if I’ve cross-threaded my oil drain bolt?” That’s probably not in the PowerPoint. That could be an instructor story that’s going to be told if you have a good instructor who’s been down that really rocky road, but again, a consistent structure is going to set you up so that you have robust base content.
— Mike Buoy
Teams are under pressure to do more—more formats, languages, publishing outputs, and audiences. After an acquisition, CompTIA faced fragmented systems, manual processes, and time-consuming formatting. In this webinar, see how CompTIA used structured learning content operations to scale globally and meet evolving delivery demands.
Now, we have a central content ecosystem where everything connects into one spot—our CCMS—where we can actually publish in many different ways. We can do our translations very seamlessly now with our translation memory service linked in. We can publish directly to our LMS record, and we can also deploy PDFs. There’s some other little things that we’ve developed over the years. For example, we map our content to the exam objectives for our certifications. That was always a very manual process. It is now automated, which is amazing.
— Becky Mann
CompTIA plays a pivotal role in the global technical ecosystem. As the largest vendor-neutral training and credentialing organization for technology professionals, CompTIA creates career-advancing opportunities across a wide range of disciplines—cybersecurity, infrastructure, data, and more.
With the support of Scriptorium and other partners, CompTIA consolidated fragmented workflows into a unified ecosystem for structured learning content. The transformation has improved production efficiency and allows CompTIA to deliver global content without pausing ongoing content production. Additionally, it allows instructional designers to invest in compelling learning experiences instead of spending their time manually formatting content.
Is AI really ready to generate your training materials? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle tackle the trends around AI in learning content. They explore where generative AI adds value—like creating assessments and streamlining translation—and where it falls short. If you’re exploring how AI can fit into your learning content strategy, this episode is for you.
Sarah O’Keefe: But what’s actually being said is AI will generate your presentation for you. If your presentation is so not new, if the information in it is so basic that generative AI can successfully generate your presentation for you, that implies to me that you don’t have anything interesting to say. So then, we get to this question of how do we use AI in learning content to make good choices, to make better learning content? How do we advance the cause?
Structured content separates content from formatting and enforces consistency, which makes it easier to deliver in multiple channels (elearning and classroom materials), scale up content delivery (delivering variants for different audiences), automate content, leverage AI for productivity, and localize the content for global markets.
Are you considering a structured approach to creating your learning content? We built LearningDITA.com as an example of what DITA and structured learning content can do! In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Allison Beatty unpack the architecture of LearningDITA to provide a pattern for other learning content initiatives.
Because we used DITA XML for the content instead of the actual authoring in Moodle, we actually saved a lot of pain for ourselves. With Moodle, the name of the game is low-code/no-code. They want you to manually build out these courses, but we wanted to automate that for obvious reasons. SCORM allowed us to do that by having a transform that would take our DITA XML, put it in SCORM, and then we just upload the SCORM package to Moodle and don’t have to do all the painful things of, you know, “Let’s put a heading two here with this little piece of content.” And the key thing is that allowed us to reuse content.
— Allison Beatty
In this episode, Alan Pringle, Bill Swallow, and Christine Cuellar explore how structured learning content supports the learning experience. They also discuss the similarities and differences between structured content for learning content and technical (techcomm) content.
Even if you are significantly reusing your learning content, you’re not just putting the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to the content and tailor certain parts of the content that are specific to your audience’s needs. If you were in a copy-and-paste scenario, you’d have to manually update it every single time you want to make a change. That scenario also makes it a lot more difficult to update content as you modify it for specific audiences over time, because you may not find everywhere a piece of information has been used and modified when you need to update it.
— Bill Swallow
In our last episode, you learned how a taxonomy helps you simplify search, create consistency, and deliver personalized learning experiences at scale. In part two of this two-part series, Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty discuss how to start developing your futureproof taxonomy from assessing your content needs to lessons learned from past projects.
Gretyl Kinsey: The ultimate end goal of a taxonomy is to make information easier to find, particularly for your user base because that’s who you’re creating this content for. With learning material, the learner is who you’re creating your courses for. Make sure to keep that end goal in mind when you’re building your taxonomy.
Can your learners find critical content when they need it? How do you deliver personalized learning experiences at scale? A learning content taxonomy might be your solution! In part one of this two-part series, Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty share what a taxonomy is, the nuances of taxonomies for learning content, and how a taxonomy supports improved learner experiences in self-paced e-learning environments, instructor-led training, and more.
Allison Beatty: I know we’ve made taxonomies through all sorts of different frames, whether it’s structuring learning content, or we’ve made product taxonomies. It’s really a very flexible and useful thing to be able to implement in your organization.
Gretyl Kinsey: And it not only helps with that user experience for things like learning objectives, but it can also help your learners find the right courses to take. If you have some information in your taxonomy that’s designed to narrow it down to a learner saying, “I need to learn about this specific subject.” And that could have several layers of hierarchy to it. It could also help your learners understand what to go back and review based on the learning objectives. It can help them make some decisions around how they need to take a course.
Ready to deliver consistent and personalized learning content at scale for your learners? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share how structured content can transform your L&D content processes. They also address challenges and opportunities for creating structured learning content.
There are other people in the content creation world who have had problems with content duplication, having to copy from one platform or tool to another. But I will tell you, from what I have seen, the people in the learning development space have it the worst in that regard—the worst.
— Alan Pringle
One of our 2024 trends was an increased interest in structured content for learning—classroom training materials, e-learning, and more—and even DITA-based learning content.
With this in mind, we have some new initiatives for 2025.
In episode 168 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Leslie Farinella, Chief Strategy Officer at Xyleme, discuss the challenges facing content operations for learning content, insights for navigating information silos, and recommendations for successful enterprise-wide collaboration.
Why do we still have these silos of content? Back to what you said, Sarah, if we’re thinking about the learner experience, the learner doesn’t distinguish between classroom, e-learning, looking something up, or going to technical documentation. They just know, “I gotta get my job done. I need to perform. I need to know what I’m doing.”
— Leslie Farinella
In episode 164 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Chris Hill of DCL talk about where you can find redundancy in your learning content, what causes it, and how a single source reuse strategy can eliminate duplication.
You really start to run into trouble when you need to make version two, and you discover a problem with version one. If I’m making some marketing materials, maybe I need to use some information from the engineering team or from the manuals for whatever product I’m marketing. I might just copy that information over and put it into my marketing materials. Then, when we go to produce our training for that particular product, we might say, “Okay, I need that stuff. I’m gonna copy that from wherever I can find it,” which might be from marketing or engineering depending on where I look and who I know better or which repository is easier for me to get to. The problem here is that if anybody has made any edits along the way, they have to ensure that those edits are propagated through all these departments. And that doesn’t always happen.
— Chris Hill
At the Training 2024 conference, we confronted the horror of modernizing content—and offered real-world advice to make the process less scary.
What if your training content could be seamlessly tailored to a learner’s environment no matter where or how they interact with it?
In episode 160 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Phylise Banner talk about the limitations of the learning management system, the rise of the learning content ecosystem, and more.
“I think about enterprise-wide applications. Consider the tools that are used to generate help solutions. Let’s just use Jira as an example. You have a knowledge base, enterprise-wide, and everyone at the organization has access to ask a question or search the knowledge base, or something like that. That’s where I want to go, that’s what I want to see. I want my learning experience platform to be like that. I want a knowledge base that I can tap into any place, anytime, anywhere. And then, have my mastery checked in the ways that I want to have it checked. ”
— Phylise Banner
We predicted three content operations trends that will impact businesses in 2024. The resources in this post will help you prepare for these trends, the changing landscape of AI, and more.
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.)
Content is a fierce beast to wrangle. I’ve experienced this after years of managing marketing content. Writing engaging, high-quality, accurate content — whether it’s from scratch or using AI as a starting place — is hard. Pile on revisions, production schedules, publishing tools, industry changes, and more, and you create a massive, wild creature.
In episode 149 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Christine Cuellar discuss the unique challenges, opportunities, and considerations of content operations with elearning content.
“As an instructional designer, as a person who’s creating this learning content, you start thinking about, How do I deliver this effectively? How do I ensure that learning actually takes place? That’s our goal here. We want the people to learn the thing.”
— Sarah O’Keefe
Whether you’re in education, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, or otherwise, you work in a learning organization. It’s critical to ensure that your employees and customers understand how to do their jobs. If your products affect health and safety — medical devices, industrial equipment, and so many more — you need effective learning content to prevent injuries or even death. Providing training through a variety of learning options leads to success.
In episode 145 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the impact content operations has on your learning and training content, and how to make the most out of this valuable asset.
“If the company is looking to implement something within a specific time frame for a very specific business need, and that gets delayed at the beginning when training is being developed, it’s going to snowball down. So, your six-week delay on getting content out the door might turn into a six-month delay on getting the program rolled out.”
— Bill Swallow
