Content curation is the process of discovering, gathering, organizing, and sharing relevant and valuable content from various sources to a specific audience or for a particular purpose. It involves sifting through a vast amount of information available on the internet and selecting the most meaningful and appropriate content to present to your target audience. Content curators aim to provide context, insight, and added value to the content they share.
Content curation offers several significant benefits for eLearning, making it an essential strategy for educators and instructional designers. Here are some of the key advantages:
Access to High-Quality Resources
Content curation allows eLearning professionals to filter and select the most relevant and high-quality learning materials. This ensures that learners have access to accurate and valuable content, enhancing the overall learning experience.
Time Efficiency
Instead of creating all course content from scratch, educators can save time by curating existing resources. This is particularly valuable when developing online courses, as it accelerates the content creation process.
Diverse Content Types
Curators can incorporate various types of content, including articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, and more. This diversity caters to different learning preferences and styles, making eLearning more engaging and effective.
Staying Current
In rapidly changing fields or industries, it can be challenging to keep course content up-to-date. Content curation allows for the inclusion of the latest information and trends, ensuring that learners receive the most current knowledge.
Customization
Content curation enables educators to tailor course content to the specific needs and interests of their learners. This personalized approach can enhance engagement and relevance.
Filling Knowledge Gaps
Educators can identify and address gaps in the existing content by curating resources that supplement the course material, providing learners with a more comprehensive understanding of the subject matter.
Cost-Effective
Creating original content, such as videos or interactive simulations, can be expensive. Content curation reduces production costs while maintaining educational quality.
Enhancing Engagement
Curated content can be interspersed with original course material, providing a change of pace and keeping learners engaged throughout the course.
Building a Learning Community
By curating and sharing resources, educators can foster a sense of community among learners. They can encourage discussions, knowledge sharing, and collaboration around the curated materials.
Professional Development
Content curation can be a valuable skill for educators and instructional designers themselves. The process of curating content enhances their own knowledge and expertise in a particular subject area.
Measurable Results
Analytics tools can track learner engagement with curated content, providing insights into which resources are most effective and helping educators refine their content selections.
Scalability
As eLearning programs expand or adapt to changing needs, content curation allows for easy updates and scalability without the need for extensive content redevelopment.
Incorporating content curation into eLearning can significantly enhance the quality of courses, save time and resources, and create a more engaging and personalized learning experience for learners. It empowers educators to leverage the vast amount of available information effectively, ensuring that learners receive the most relevant and up-to-date knowledge.
Content Curation Tools for eLearning
There are several content curation tools available that can assist you in this task. Here are some popular ones:
Pocket: Pocket is a simple and effective tool for saving articles, videos, and web pages to read later. It has a browser extension and mobile app that allows you to save content with just a click. You can organize your saved items into tags and categories.
Diigo: Diigo is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to highlight, annotate, and save web pages. It's great for collaborative research and can help you gather and organize resources with comments and notes.
Feedly: Feedly is an RSS reader that helps you stay up-to-date with content from your favorite websites and blogs. You can curate a list of sources relevant to your eLearning topics and easily access their latest updates.
Pinterest: While traditionally used for visual inspiration, Pinterest can be a valuable tool for curating educational content. You can create boards and pin articles, images, and videos related to your eLearning materials.
Flipboard: Flipboard is a personalized news aggregator that lets you curate your own magazines. You can follow topics, add articles, and create a visually appealing magazine of resources for your eLearning audience.
Scoop.it: Scoop.it is a content curation platform that helps you discover and curate content based on your interests. You can create topic-specific boards and easily share your curated content with others.
Evernote: Evernote is a versatile note-taking app that can also be used for content curation. You can clip web articles, save PDFs, and organize them into notebooks and tags for easy retrieval.
Pearltrees: Pearltrees is a visual content curation tool that lets you organize web content into a tree-like structure of interconnected "pearls." It's an excellent way to create a visually appealing resource repository.
Padlet: Padlet is a virtual bulletin board that allows you to collect and organize various types of content, such as links, images, videos, and documents. It's collaborative and can be used for group content curation.
Trello: Trello is a project management tool, but it can also be used for content curation. Create boards for different topics and use cards to add and organize content, set deadlines, and collaborate with team members.
Google Keep: Google Keep is a note-taking app that integrates with Google Workspace. You can save notes, images, and links and organize them with labels and color-coding, making it easy to find and share resources.
Zapier: Zapier is an automation tool that can help you connect various apps and automate content curation tasks. For example, you can set up Zaps to automatically save new articles from RSS feeds to your chosen storage platform.
The choice of content curation tool may depend on your specific needs and preferences. Many of these tools offer free versions with limited features, so you can explore them to determine which one works best for your eLearning resource gathering process.
About LMS Portals
At LMS Portals, we provide our clients and partners with a SaaS-based, multi-tenant learning management system that allows you to launch a dedicated training environment (a portal) for each of your unique audiences.
The system includes built-in, SCORM-compliant rapid course development software that provides a drag and drop engine to enable most anyone to build engaging courses quickly and easily.
We also offer a complete library of ready-made courses, covering most every aspect of corporate training and employee development.
If you choose to, you can create Learning Paths to deliver courses in a logical progression and add structure to your training program. The system also supports Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) and provides tools for social learning.
Together, these features make the LMS Portals platform the ideal solution for your eLearning and employee training programs.
Contact us today to get started or visit our Partner Program pages