Great article, Georgina. From the point of view of cultural institutions providing educational material, I've seen the following factors come into play:
* Staff are incentivised to write or commission new content, which content designers and editors are expected to prioritise. There is limited capacity to repurpose or rework older content that could easily have its shelf life extended.
* People are reluctant to take down older resources which, supported by years of SEO, often out-perform newer, better-structured material in organic search results. The relatively high traffic then justifies keeping the content online well beyond its natural life.
* Teachers and students want easily digestible material with a simple structure, as you say, but funding is often more readily available for research projects that end up on dedicated websites and are over-engineered with maps, charts, knowledge graphs and such like. These are seldom tested with teachers or students before completion, and funding doesn't extend to supporting them after the initial development period, or later folding them into a larger set of resources.
* For providers that have been publishing content for 15 to 20 years, material isn't just scattered across different _parts_ of the website, it can sometimes be scattered across different sites that run on different web infrastructure, but are stitched together (just barely) by the site navigation.
- Completely agree, that chimes with a lot of the experience I've seen in cultural institutions' learning deparments
- That's an interesting observation re funding, I'd not thought of that, but I think you're completely right - I do think the way we evaluate the success of digital projects needs to be re-evaluated
- That's so true re different parts of the web estate rather than just different parts of the website.
Good to meet a fellow digital learning content wrangler!
Great article, Georgina. From the point of view of cultural institutions providing educational material, I've seen the following factors come into play:
* Staff are incentivised to write or commission new content, which content designers and editors are expected to prioritise. There is limited capacity to repurpose or rework older content that could easily have its shelf life extended.
* People are reluctant to take down older resources which, supported by years of SEO, often out-perform newer, better-structured material in organic search results. The relatively high traffic then justifies keeping the content online well beyond its natural life.
* Teachers and students want easily digestible material with a simple structure, as you say, but funding is often more readily available for research projects that end up on dedicated websites and are over-engineered with maps, charts, knowledge graphs and such like. These are seldom tested with teachers or students before completion, and funding doesn't extend to supporting them after the initial development period, or later folding them into a larger set of resources.
* For providers that have been publishing content for 15 to 20 years, material isn't just scattered across different _parts_ of the website, it can sometimes be scattered across different sites that run on different web infrastructure, but are stitched together (just barely) by the site navigation.
Thanks Nick, really thoughtful response
- Completely agree, that chimes with a lot of the experience I've seen in cultural institutions' learning deparments
- That's an interesting observation re funding, I'd not thought of that, but I think you're completely right - I do think the way we evaluate the success of digital projects needs to be re-evaluated
- That's so true re different parts of the web estate rather than just different parts of the website.
Good to meet a fellow digital learning content wrangler!