3 Ways CDPs Are Disrupting Learning and Development

Take a walk across any corporate training industry conference vendor showroom, and you’ll notice something: the vast majority of technology available is designed for corporate learning and development teams. While these folks are very worthy of tech that helps them manage learning journeys for vast populations of internal employees, any training admin supporting an external learner is left in the cold. They need solutions that provide document security while making it easy to put digital content in front of learners. For too long, learning and development teams responsible for customer training, custom-designed courses, and channel partner training have had to patch together solutions from feature-heavy technology designed for somebody else.

Enter the Courseware Distribution Platform. Here’s what it is and why it’s disrupting the learning and development space (in the best way possible). 

What is a Courseware Distribution Platform (CDP)?

A Courseware Distribution Platform (CDP) is a technology solution dedicated to getting your digital training content in front of your learners. That can include all digital content formats, such as PDFs, podcasts or audio files, videos, images, and even SCORM-compliant elearning modules. 

CDPs stand out because they focus on solving one problem: putting content in learners’ hands. Before the CDP, most corporate training document online distribution solutions came embedded in an LMS. While that is a great digital content delivery platform for internal employees, the LMS is quickly imperfect when it comes to sharing electronic documents outside your organization to train customers or channel partners. 

That’s why the CDP is here to change things up. Whatever kind of digital documents you need to get in front of your learners, the CDP is designed to make it easy and secure. 

Here are three ways the CDP is disrupting L&D:

Security measures (that don’t get stuck in IT firewalls)

The main challenge facing training teams with external learners is how to share course materials to learners without risking the security of that intellectual property. The CDP solves that by sharing content within a secure environment. Similar to how Spotify puts music on mobile phones or Amazon puts books on Kindles, the CDP makes it easy for training teams to put course materials on their learners’ devices without worrying that the content will be pirated.

Within the Mimeo Digital CDP, that includes a wide variety of security options, including: watermarking, applying DRM (digital rights management) to stop file downloading, content expiration dates, revoking content from learners who leave a course, and blocking digital printing. 

Easy conversion to mobile (no coding required)

Instructional designers around the world preach about how important it is to design training content to be mobile-friendly. Yet many training teams struggle to get the time or money budget to convert their content into mobile-friendly formats. 

The CDP takes conversion out of the equation. Whether you are uploading training documents as PDFs, video, or elearning modules, the CDP converts your content for a mobile-friendly experience. For example, the Mimeo Digital CDP offers users the choice of interacting with your content on a browser, tablet, or mobile device of their choice. The CDP back-end takes care of optimization so that admins only have to upload one piece of content for all user experiences.

Tech support (so your team can focus on your expertise)

One major headache involved in instructor-led training, whether it is virtual instructor led training or in-person, is troubleshooting technical problems. Even if you are training customers on your complex software product, your facilitators are not experts on the training delivery platform (and they shouldn’t have to waste class time on it). 

That’s why CDPs like Mimeo Digital embed customer support within the platform. Whether your learners are signing into a remote class in Beijing or in the same room as your facilitator in Boston, you can count on the 24/7 chat support to help them with log-in issues or to answer questions about how to access your course materials. That way, your facilitators can focus on facilitating and you can focus on your to-do list. 

The next time you’re walking through a learning and development industry expo, keep an eye out for CDPs. When you find the right technology disrupting the right problems for you, you just might end up with a better solution to hybrid learning and putting content in front of your learners.