3 Approaches to Developing Content At Scale

There is a rising debate on college investment returns, and the pressure to offer high-quality and engaging course materials at low costs is greater than ever.

A large portion of young people in the US are not enrolling in colleges. Many others have found cost-effective alternative pathways to well-paying jobs. With the resurgence of community colleges and trade schools, universities have to work harder and reconfigure their courses to make them more attractive and cost-effective for students.

Yet many universities struggle to develop an approach for improving their courses. They often dabble between resources to find the right content fit. Below, I offer three approaches universities can take to address the challenges of expanding their programs.

Approaches to Scale Content Development in Universities

Each university must decide just how much to do when expanding its programs. There are many ways to reach the relevant approach, from efficiency to empowerment and continuous growth.

1. Bringing Efficiency in the Process by Building Backward

A great first step is backward design, where you identify the learning outcomes from the course. From there you build on the content further by considering:

1. The kinds of assessments that will demonstrate the student impact.

2. The tasks that will help students achieve those outcomes.

3. Readings, lectures, and activities necessary for the assignments.

For this, LMS platforms can be of great help. Sure they can help search, manage, and keep track of course content but they can do much more.

LMSs can help understand how the course assessments are helping you achieve your learning objectives. Let’s break this down with an example:

For a lecture on human anatomy, you would have set learning objectives. You would want the students to be able to identify major organs, understand their functions, and explain how they work together by the end of the semester.

After a series of quizzes and assignments, you can review the assessments through the LMS. Here you notice that many students are struggling with understanding the function of the liver through the low scores on related questions.

Based on this feedback, you can plan new content to address the liver’s function more clearly, maybe through an interactive diagram or a video explaining its role in digestion.

Now when you sit to plan the next unit on the respiratory system, you can define learning outcomes specifically for that topic. For example, “Students should be able to explain how the lungs exchange gases with the blood.” You can then ensure that the new assessments also accurately measure whether students reach that specific outcome.

2. Empowering Educators to Go Beyond Existing Materials

Search for syllabi from similar courses online, particularly those from universities or open courseware. Reviewing these can help shape your course structure and provide a starting point.

MIT OpenCourseWare provides course materials from actual MIT classes, which educators can use to design their course content or just pull specific lessons.

Now here, instead of simply reviewing or copying content, create critical summaries that align with what you want to achieve and then structure the course accordingly.

Universities can automate the collection of data by searching and scraping information from sources like Perplexity and Semantic Scholar. They can then structure the extracted knowledge into a coherent framework for content development.

But there is a need for caution here because AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude tend to generate a lot of content from thin air. Hence, starting from the exact voice you want to the kind of content you want, these models need to be trained. This way it follows a very detailed outline and writes sections of just a few hundred words at a time, using thousands of words of researched content for each section.

This process can be replicated for your visual content requirements too.

-Several AI agents can now help you generate custom illustrations for your content.

-Another way to use this would be to automate the search for relevant images using stock photo APIs and then use AI to evaluate and choose the most suitable image.

This can save institutions hundreds of hours in research and debates.

3. Extending Resources On-Demand for Continuous Growth

Given the nature of academia, courses have to be revised more than once, which means content development is not just a one-time exercise. As you continue developing new content, your repository of information will only stack up. And all of that content needs to be interconnected and accessible on demand. This needs computing power, storage, and collaboration tools, which traditional infrastructure often fails to provide.

Cloud-based platforms allow universities to provision resources instantly. Whether you need more space for content creation, storage, collaboration, or the advanced processing power required to drive AI, the cloud can help you do that on the go.

Cloud-hosted content delivery networks (CDNs) and multi-region deployment models help you deliver and access content from any part of the world.

This means that if you want to develop a global MBA program, you can have authors, designers, experts, and other stakeholders contributing content to the same doc from the world over.

With the cloud’s advanced scaling capabilities, they can process multimedia files, run AI-driven content recommendations, and test interactive simulations without investing in costly in-house infrastructure. All this can be done in real-time without the usual delays and downtime linked with physical infrastructure.

To scale up your content delivery explore our cloud services here.