| How It Works
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If you have used PowerPoint (or countless other tools, including word processors and spreadsheets), you understand the concept of separating content from style. With these tools, you can enter plain content and apply a number of “style sets” to it, changing its appearance. Experience eventually teaches users that it is a bad idea to embed styles within content. With embedded styles, it is a time-consuming effort to restructure content for use in other places, where the styles in the various re-used bits would not match or would conflict.
And yet, we routinely structure our eLearning content in such a way that we embed “flow.” "Flow" refers to the context or sequence of elements. Many instructional design models, as well as most if not all authoring tools, assume a certain strategy for instruction or learning. Each strategy typically involves an implicit flow, and this flow becomes embedded in eLearning as well.
At Breakthrough PerformanceTech, we have developed an extensible learning content management system, or LCMX. This allows authors to create content that is independent not only of style, but also of presentation flow. By using this system, designers can present the same content in different “looks” and (perhaps more importantly) in different “ways.”
By separating Content, Style and Flow, and integrating extensibility, an extended Learning Content Management System allows courseware authors to leverage their learning content and present it in countless different ways for a wide variety of target platforms and in a remarkably short time frame.
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