How many courses do you really need in a course
catalog? 100? 1,000? 10,000?
Abundance is a blessing in another way. Digital learning offers tremendous advantages over traditional classroom in the variety of course content that can be made available. Since e-courses have no dependency on physical space, live instructors, or specific time slots, an organization can make a virtually limitless variety of course topics available to learners with a simple mouse click. Not only can courses address different topics, but different learner levels, perspectives, and learning styles as well. We can think of this as the abundance of relevance.
And from the organization’s perspective abundance is a blessing. First and foremost because the organization cannot begin to reliably predict the needs of a large population of users. The workforce changes, individual needs change, projects change and the nature of the organization’s focus and mission changes. In today’s world, where entire economies can change dramatically overnight, learning has never been more critical to ensuring organizational agility. And because technology makes abundance possible, it is almost always preferred to the alternative, scarcity.
Moreover, we are living in an era where abundance has become economically feasible. This is especially true when an organization begins to calculate the often hidden costs of trying to administer a small tightly focused set of courses for small subsets of the workforce.
But there is a caveat. As abundance increases, so too must
the ease of selection. That is, the ability to find what you are looking
for. When the catalog is small, a loose grouping can work. As selection
grows, a more sophisticated organizational structure, i.e. a topical hierarchy,
is required. A course catalog is a hierarchical listing and when delivered
digitally it offers users greater flexibility for efficient navigation
including well-understood conventions like nested subcategories, cross-linking,
and cross-binning content that can be relevant in multiple categories.
By far, however, the most important tool when navigating a vast catalog is search. Users have been ‘googlized’ and have come to rely on search as a primary way to navigate large content domains. So, search engine strategy is a key requirement for enabling your workforce to effectively leverage a wide and deep e-learning catalog. In a sense, search is the sibling of abundance, and together this pair can power an organization’s development strategy exponentially over traditional classroom learning options.
By: John Ambrose


John Ambrose
Julie Ogilvie
Pam Boiros
Stephanie Pyle
Tim Hildreth
Darlene Frederick
Shawn Hunter
Glenn Nott
Kevin Young