Case Study 2: Providing training under different brand names

Scenario: CompanyY manufactures components that are sold through VAR (value added reseller) channels under a number of brand names. There is an obvious and immediate need for online manuals and training materials that resellers can both use internally and provide for their own clients, but two problems have prevented the project from moving forward.

First, each VAR orders the component with substantially different assembly options, so that the manuals for a component produced for one VAR are not identical to those of another. The manuals and training material must be produced with these variations in mind.

Second, each VAR is insistant that, if they are to successfully present the materials to their own customers, the online materials must present their own branding, including the style and navigation of their own, already-existing websites. The VARs specifically do not want CompanyY's branding or corporate look to be highlighted instead their own, as they want to provide their customers with a united product experience.

Solution: To solve the first problem, it may seem that CompanyY has no choice but to design, construct, and maintain separate online training materials for each of their VARs. This represents a substantial expense, and a non-trivial maintenance problem: VAR corporate looks may change over time, and the prospect of creating new versions of the documentation upon each of those changes is not attractive to CompanyY's staff.

Using the first generations of e-learning software, this would in fact be the required path. However, more modern toolkits are capable of meeting these requirements in a more straightforward fashion.

First, CompanyY identifies the portions of the training materials that may change according to the design specifications used by each VAR. This is a discrete and already-known list, since the number of design options in the component are already well identified.

The training materials can then be constructed as a series of reusable learning objects (RLOs). Each "section" of material is created as an individual reusable object: for those sections that must change according to customized VAR specifications, one matching object is created for each VAR-required "option."

The e-learning environment can then construct, automatically, material specific to the product distributed by a given VAR by merging only the objects specific to that VAR. This is the essence of RLO-based course design: the construction of unique, separate courses -- or a single, dynamically generated course -- from a library of smaller components.

This approach still does not solve the second problem, that of providing a training environment for each VAR that matches that VAR's own corporate identity. This is, in most situations, the more intractable problem: while CompanyY can reasonably expect to keep track of the features and options of its own product, and change the training materials accordingly, it cannot reasonably multiply those changes by the number of discrete corporate looks utilized by it's many VARs.

The "look and feel" of training materials, using a fourth-generation platform, does not necessarily need to be tied to the actual contents of those materials. In other words, RLOs may be used to construct dynamic courses, but a separate layer of information may be used to determine the "look" that those materials will be given according to the specific user of that material. These "look and feel" layers are typically called content styles.

CompanyY therefore creates a content style for each of it's VARs, working with the VAR to produce the look and feel that matches the VAR's other online materials. The VARs can even be given access to update and modify their own style information, removing the need for CompanyY to be involved with any future changes to those styles.

The e-learning environment can then be configured to present the correct training materials, with the correct "look and feel," according to the specific VAR that has linked to those materials. To consumers, it will appear as if the training material is an integral part of the VAR's website.