Pitfalls of Managing Your Learning Content and How to Avoid Them with a Course Controller

The problem with changing content on an LMS

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Content must constantly be updated to stay relevant. Best practice yesterday isn’t necessarily best practice today.

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Let’s say, for example, a new lifting technique helps reduce long-term back pain. It’s essential to update any manual handling courses with the new lifting technique. Ideally, you’d want this process to be smooth and easy. Traditionally, the process of updating your courses has not been so simple. 

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The typical process for a learning management system is that you can upload a course and provide access to learners. Compliance requirements are constantly changing, which makes updating courses a necessity. Each time you want to update a course on your LMS, you would need to repeat the entire upload process again.

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This is where a course controller can help.

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What is a course controller?

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A course controller is a type of software that allows you to access and control course content on your LMS directly.

etrainu uses Content Controller, a product of Rustici Software. It allows us to manage our courses easily and enhances our customers’ user journey. We’ll explore how we use it in more detail. 

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What are the benefits of a course controller?

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A solution like this one offers many advantages. We’ve listed some of them for you.

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1. Easier to manage and update your courses—version control

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Traditionally, version control has been a difficult process—with plenty of manual management.

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It was tedious and time-consuming. Let’s break down why.

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• When you create a course, you need to download it into a compatible format for it to work on an LMS
• So, each time you update your course, you would—in theory—need to update the course in your authoring tool and then redownload the new version in an updated file 
• Then, you would need to reupload the new file to your LMS
• Let’s say the content is consumed by organisations on different LMSs 
• This means asking each organisation to update the file in their LMS 

So, we sought a solution and found Content Controller, a Rustici product.

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Basically, it allows us to:

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• Update our content easily
• Convert and share our content into the correct format, e.g. SCORM, SCORM 1.2, LTI, etc.
• Control access to courses and intellectual property (as you can view licenses and end-date agreements)
• Generate reports if needed (which makes administration much more straightforward)

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This solution automatically updates and disseminates the content to your learners on every LMS—meaning there is one centralised location to manage your content.

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2. Time-saving

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As we mentioned, older content management methods were very manual, relying on administrators to individually update or upload files and send them across platforms.

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Using a course controller saves more time in the long run. It makes it easier and faster to:

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• Upload and download files
• Update naming conventions
• Ensure the right file is being used in every LMS 

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3. Supports additional advanced reporting

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In most cases, you will need a license to access courses. Depending on the type of license you receive, you will be limited to a specific number of users per course, e.g. 100.

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Some learning management systems will give an overview of this data quickly and easily to administrators. However, depending on your platform this may be more difficult. A course controller provides an overview of how many users you have and gives you a timeline of your license’s validity. It also gives you alerts for user limits and contract renewals.

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That way, you can decide if you need to renew your license or change the number of users required, depending on your training needs at the time.

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Final thoughts

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If you use an LMS and regularly need new content or need to update it, we highly recommend integrating with a course controller.