We always suggest that course content created by our clients is readied in advance of the deadline so that once the online learning system is completely signed off, it can be populated and launched complete with course content.

But course content creation comes with a heavy burden. It's time-consuming, you'll need to have planned out modules, storyboarded your content and have everything ready to deliver your course; whether that be a video camera for webinars, a screen sharing program or the layout of your assessments.

In an ideal world you'll have an instructional designer on board, ready to help you or your trainers create engaging course content. However, when budgets are constrained there's an easier alternative to creating your own course content.

"Provided the course content is freely accessible, it's always easier to populate your online teaching platform with other people's content. Using curated content takes a lot of pressure off of you and your team, and you'll be able to offer high-quality courses without the headache of creating them yourself, or paying for someone else's expertise." ~ Kaine Shutler

The Solution: An eLearning Platform for Curated Content

Creating custom online teaching platforms means that we're able to create online learning systems for businesses regardless of whether they create or curate their course content.

You may think that content curation means paying for other courses, but it doesn't have to come at a cost - some course content is freely available online. These can take the form of articles, webinars and podcasts, some of which can be embedded or linked-to without violating copyright laws.

We've created an online learning system which actively pulls through course content from other websites. Content is filed by category, theme or topic and uses a popularity system, based on 'favouriting', to ensure the best content is positioned first.

Pulling Through Course Content from Third Party Websites

We've created an elearning platform for curated content for a course: Mastering Sales. Below the introduction is the list of courses and resources available for this topic from various websites - the original source of which is credited in the top left of the featured image.

The featured images, page title and any meta data/ introduction text from the page is all pulled through from the website, while clicking on the link takes you to that respective web page. This form of content curation is legal as it pulls content through HTML embeds or RSS feeds - technologies provided by the publishers themselves to increase the shareability of their content.

As mentioned, each piece of curated content for the custom learning management system comes with a functionality allowing learners to favourite courses and even comment, keeping the top rated courses near the top, and pushing lower ranking courses to the end of the feed.

Additionally an expanded view of these courses shows some content from the web page copy that is automatically pulled through, and any additional comments from other users.

Creating a custom learning management system of this kind, for both original and curated content is what we do. We listen to the needs of our clients and create systems that not only tick all the boxes, but are future proof should the platform need to grow.

This design might be optimised for mobile, but we can create elearning platforms that are cross-compatible on a variety of devices, operating systems and website browsers. To see a selection of online teaching platforms we've created for our clients click here.