Content curation has been a trending topic in the Learning and Development (L&D) space for a few years. It is collecting, editing, and sharing high-quality, relevant information from various sources tailored to a certain audience’s needs. Like a museum curator who decides which piece of art to display, content curators filter and navigate through the ocean of information to provide insights, trends, and knowledge that appeal to their audience’s interests and needs.

That goes beyond boosting the curator’s credibility, deepening audience engagement, and creating a more tailored and relevant learning experience. By adopting a curation approach, learning and development leaders can provide learning nuggets that create value and are finely tuned to their learners’ goals.

Curated Content Strategies

Types of Curated Content in the L&D Industry

Content could serve as a means of driving learner engagement, presenting different options for personalization, and demystifying complex topics. In the L&D context, these are the main types of curated content:

1. Aggregation

What It Is: Aggregation collects and centralizes the most relevant content on a single topic into one location.

Purpose: This approach is widely used and forms the backbone of numerous learning portals and knowledge bases. It streamlines access to crucial content by enabling students to discover relevant resources as needed.

2. Distillation

What It Is: Distillation involves stripping away extraneous information to highlight a topic’s most essential ideas or insights.

Purpose: This method ensures that learners get small, focused pieces of information, which makes it especially useful in dealing with specific steps in the learning journey where focus is essential.

3. Elevation

What It Is: Elevation combines different pieces of content to produce more general insights or trends.

Purpose: This approach enables the identification of patterns and the generation of new ideas, allowing learners to gain a broader view of overarching themes and offering them innovative perspectives.

4. Mashups

What It Is: A mashup combines different content to offer a new, original perspective.

Purpose: It facilitates new relationships from various materials—like industry reports, case discussions, and multimedia—that assist in generating creative thought and significant learning.

5. Chronology

What It Is: Chronology depicts content across a timeline or narrative, showcasing how ideas, concepts or theories progress.

Purpose: This is a historical approach, where participants learn through a progressive illustration of how knowledge has evolved rather than starting from scratch each time. The idea is that once progress can be understood, it becomes easier to comprehend new ideas and thoughts within a field or topic.

Content Curation vs. Content Repurposing: What is the Difference?

Both content curation and content repurposing methods concern themselves with using existing documents, but their processes, aims, and results differ. Here’s a look at some of these differences:

Definition

Content curation entails discovering, selecting, and disseminating found (and often externally produced or published) information from reliable and credible sources to complement your content. The point is to enhance value through sharing and curating external outlet relevance and credibility.

Content repurposing involves taking the same content and putting it out in a different format or modifying it to suit a specific audience, learning goal or platform.

Process

Content curation focuses on finding and assessing external resources and combining them. Within the L&D context, this could include discovering interesting articles, videos or tools created by others and arranging them in a sequence.

Content repurposing is essentially reusing your content. For example, you could transform a webinar into a microlearning module or repurpose an elaborate training manual as an infographic or video tutorial.

Objective

Content curation aims to gather and curate useful information on behalf of learners, giving them access to different perspectives or insights without the need to generate new content.

Content repurposing aims to extend the utility and lifespan of existing resources by adapting them for new purposes, learners, or delivery modes.

Creation vs. Adaptation

Content curation is based on aggregated raw material developed by others, focusing on organization and relevance.

Content repurposing focuses on tweaking and reusing your content for a different context, purpose, or audience.

Effective Content Curation Strategies for Learning and Development Professionals

According to the Future Market Insights report, the global content curation software market will reach $1.8 billion by 2032. With various options, L&D managers can follow effective content curation planning and ensure proper alignment with organizational goals. By following these best practices, you can approach content curation with intention and amplify your impact on your organization or learner audience.

1. Understand Your Learners

  • Tailor curated content to align with your learners’ needs and your organization’s learning objectives.
  • Share relevant and applicable content, adding value to your community’s learning experience.
  • Use your content strategy and learner personas to guide what content to select and share.

2. Credit Original Sources

  • This is essential for upholding ethical standards and maintaining credibility by consistently crediting and linking the source.
  • Presenting curated material as your own can shatter trust with your audience. Trust is the first step in succeeding with your brand or as an L&D professional.
  • Highlight contributors with tagging where appropriate (ex., @ on LinkedIn or professional learning networks).
  • When curating from multiple sources, provide clear attribution and a link to the full resources.

3. Add Context and Insights

  • Add your knowledge or insights to curated content to make it more relevant and actionable.
  • Add brief commentary or summaries to provide context for the content in the context of your learning objectives.
  • Develop infographics or quote images to highlight important points and attract learners.

4. Do Everything in Phases and with a Calendar

  • Schedule curated and original content in advance to save time and maintain consistency.
  • Use tools like LMS or social media management platforms to organize, schedule and analyze the impact of your content strategy.
  • Decide when the content concerning key events or learning outcomes will be created or curated.

5. Diversify Your Content Mix

  • Maintain a balanced approach by integrating various types of content, ensuring a mix that resonates with different learning styles and preferences.
  • Aim for a 40% original and 60% curated content ratio, emphasizing high-quality and actionable resources.
  • Make fully original content the cornerstone of your strategy and use professional-quality materials to supplement and elevate leaner content.

Conclusion

Content curation has become a powerful tool for professionals to have a more quality and relevant learning experience. By curating, augmenting, and distributing relevant content well-considerably, L&D leaders can address various learning needs, create engagement, and support organizational objectives. When used effectively, content curation augments the original creation and is still a powerful tool that we use to learn and hone workplace skills.

According to the CIPD Good Work Index, opportunities to develop skills are the most cited factor for success among employees who said their career development exceeded expectations. Do you want your L&D strategy to go to the next level? Use these best practices today to begin curating smarter and creating impactful learning experiences for your audience. Connect with us—let us know your thoughts, strategies or questions in the comments below!

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