Learn'ilities' is new. It was established in March 2007 as an independent consultancy ready to grow and expand to meet the new demands faced by a growing number of organisations as they begin to implement new generation systems for learning and knowledge management.
Several important factors are bringing change to the way that organisations see their next generation systems for learning and knowledge management:
- Most countries are experiencing critical skill shortages in key areas. Organisations need to find new ways to plan and manage the capability growth of their employees. Basically, learning and knowledge management needs to be integrated into daily activities. The systems that support integrated learning are characteristically different to those of the previous generation systems.
- Increasing numbers of organisations are moving away from monolithic applications that constrain the flexibility of the services their business needs to provide, both internally and externally, and are moving towards service-based approaches where best-of-breed applications interoperate to provide client-facing solutions.
- The development (in-sourced or out-sourced) and management of content in response to business needs across organisations and their partners require new approaches. Content needs to be more fluid and must be capable of supporting a diverse range of organsational needs through reuse and interoperability. Content is expensive to develop and maintain. Being able to repurpose the same content across the full range of services within an organisation (learning, training, knowledge management, performance support, product support, technical documentation, sales support, etc) is a critical factor in reducing the costs and improving efficiency across business functions.
- Portability of content at varying levels of granularity between applications and infrastructures is a critical requirement for distributed organisations, educational consortia and digital content marketplaces. Implementing content strategies with compatible infrastructure systems is an essential part of meeting this type of requirement.
Learn'ilities' is a solution architecture practice with a primary focus on the infrastructure, content and related processes that contribute to 'real world' solutions for learning and knowledge management systems. The goal of Learn'ilities' is to assist those organisations that want to achieve the optimum levels of reusability and interoperability of the content in which they invest.
Learn'ilities' derives its name from two sources. Learn, which the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines as:
- acquire knowledge of or skill in (something) through study or experience or by being taught.
- become aware of by information or from observation.
- memorize.
The Learn'ilities' practice is centred on systems and content where the primary objectives are learning and knowledge management. The second part of the Learn'ilities' name is 'ilities' which is a reference to the high-level functionalities described by the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) developed by the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative. (Section 1.2.1 SCORM 2004 3rd Edition - Overview) The high-level 'ilities' as they are known, are:
- reusability: the ability to use instructional components in multiple applications, courses and contexts.
- interoperability: the ability to take instructional components developed in one system and use them in another system.
- accessibility: the ability to locate and access instructional components from multiple locations and deliver them to other locations.
- durability: the ability of instructional components to withstand technology changes over time without costly redesign, reconfiguration or recoding.
- adaptability: the ability to change instructional components to satisfy differing user needs [and contexts].
- maintainability*: the ability to withstand content evolution and changes without costly redesign, reconfiguration or recoding.
In addition, Learn'ilities' has gained important experience working with clients to implement solutions that optimize compliance with the principles of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) within their business context and government legislation that may also apply.
The combined message is that Learn'ilities' focuses on the development of infrastructures, content and processes that enable organisations to provide new generation, integrated learning both internally and externally according to their business needs.
Of course, solution architecture such as that undertaken by Learn'ilities' requires more than just any single standard, specificiation or application profile. The SCORM high-level 'ilities' do, however, summarise the key areas of concern for integrated learning solutions. Learn'ilities' has developed strong relationships with a range of standards, specification and application profiling organisations in order to better serve client needs for standards-based development.
*In more recent presentations and discussions, ADL has tended to replace 'affordability' with 'maintainability' which is a more encompassing term.