Content or Platform?

“What comes first: Content or Platform?” is a question that is comes up as inevitably as a bug in a beta. I’ve always thought this to be a rather straightforward question. But in my experience, I have quite often been very surprised to see a lot of people confidently moving in the opposite direction; hence this blog post.

I have been repeating the statement, “In eLearning, system/platform is an enabler. Most important is the content (learning material) that needs to be delivered by the platform/system.” Unless you have decided what content will be placed in the platform, any kind of sophisticated, state of the art, cutting-edge technology will be a dead-investment.

Here’s another potential pitfall.

After having decided on the content that will be delivered, what kind of platform do you build? When it comes to building systems using technologies, there is always this worry about what pieces of an eLearning platform should I build. Should I put all the systems in place for me to develop, maintain, and deliver the content? Or can I build it brick by brick?

Questions worth deliberating.

(Anand Subramanian is Head – Systems Design at TATA Interactive Systems.)