Media Organizer

The Media Organizer Story

Media Organizer actually started out as a way to selfishly reduce our own workload. When working with training sites, we were the bottleneck whenever there were changes needed to any sorts of online content. The contend developers were constantly updating pdfs, power points, videos and e-learning packages.

We had to deal with the uploading & updating process in most cases to make sure the files stayed secured and the links did not break. So we made a centralized content manger where all the content was refereed to an ID. But when we starting thinking about what was possible, we also thought about how Youtube would convert videos in any number of formats so the they could be securely streamed. This way our clients videos could always be secured and embedded anywhere they needed.

On the surface, that may seem like a little issue, but when we look at their training materials, videos were often re-used through out the site and typically they were included over and over in each separate e-learning package. This was not only a huge waste of disk space, but made the update process a time consuming since we had to update the multiple conversion files in multiple locations.

So Media Organizer allowed us to centralize the content and then simply refer to the resource by a single ID whenever we needed to embed it in the site. The bottlenecks evaporated.  The content developers could securely update updates, all the necessary changes were made to secure the content and if it was a video, we made all the conversion on the fly. They didn’t even have to involve us in any edits.

Since Media Organizer also made it easy to preview the content, it became an excellent sandbox to test new videos and e-learning content before we added them to the production site. The client started warehousing all their content assets there like an off-line backup and it also allowed the team to easy find photos and videos to use by the multiple content developers.

We then saw the opportunity to take the idea one step further. Let the content developers assemble their own course materials.

Enter Class Binders. Think of those college days when the professor would give out 3-ring binders that typically included your syllabus, his contact information, schedule and all the lesson content. Most course are a combination of multiple things. They can arrive as PDFs, PowerPoints, Videos and multi-media e-Learning content.

What if the instructional designer wanted to load a video for the first lesson and then give them a PDF flip book, then give them a quiz in Articulate? Well that is all easy with Class Binders.

With Class Binders, you simply make a lesson. That lesson you can either load a Media Organizer resource or some HTML code. Want that lesson to be a publically accessible YouTube video? No problem just embed it.

The finished work was a nice and neat container that can be handed to each participant digitally and best of all, each lesson can be tracked for completion.

So Media Organizer started out as a Content Management System (CMS), but it eventually also became a Learning Management System (LMS). 

Funny things happen when you start to optimize things like this.

1. The amount of time to assemble a new course from the point it was given to the developers fell from weeks to hours. The content developers could also easily update materials without having us restart the course building process.
2. Previously large Articulate Storyline packages were created to try and take the course participant through the entire process. Participants on older computer and slower connections would complain since it took forever for these environments to fully load and become active. Breaking the large e-Learning packages into smaller lessons and reusing the same content with IDs, made them not only load faster, but it also greatly reduce the bandwidth and load on the servers during peak training times. Most people did not finish the entire course in one sitting anyway. So the smaller lessons allowed them to quickly pick up where they left off.
3. We were now able to easily protect all the download files offered to the participants since they were served via Media Organizer instead of the e-learning package.

So in the end, this was a:

• Win for the Course Developers.
• Win for the Content Creators
• Win for the Course Participants
• (and one more Win for the System Administrators watching the servers easily deal with the training traffic)

Would you like to learn how Media Organizer can help your organization? Contact us today to get a free consultation.