David, first, congrats on the new role! Wish you well. And yes, I wrote about granularity circa 2000. My best heuristic: what’s the smallest thing you’d give to one person instead of another. Largely, in my mind, it’d revolve around cognitive role, whether job aid, example, practice, etc. Used these principles in a content model for a publisher client. And I similarly have complained that SCORM, while capable of whatever granularity, has been typically monolithic. xAPI gives us somewhat better hopes. And welcome you talking about your experiences, please do! I’ve been pushing this for several years (Learning Solutions articles in 2012, an Intelligent Content conference review in 2013), so glad to hear it’s finally getting some traction. Thanks for sharing!

So glad to see you outline these challenges. I just accepted a new role, and very specifically, because of specific customizations to a software platform, there is no vanilla and every client has a unique product. So, this very challenge is something I will need to resolve to pull the right content in context at time of need (I also have some format/device challenges to address). Happy to share as much as I can as I go along.

Aaron Silvers said during an LSCon presentation which was very powerful and resonated very strongly with me (and ultimately why I felt the vision for SCORM wasn’t truly realized for content REuse).

Aaron used some of the same content from this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/aaronesilvers/content-wrangling). He noted that most designers/developers are NOT BEING GRANULAR ENOUGH to effectively use or understand the content. The amount of granularity and tagging for effective “tracking” and reuse with good context is significant.

Vivian, yes, the text is small, a fact of trying to put too much on one screen (though that’s how the program does ‘presentation’ mode), and the compression by Vimeo. And yes, I do mean Job Aid as performance support. Your blended model is exactly where I want this to go, but am starting from a more familiar tack for most. In the longer term, all our content (performance support, user-generated, etc) should all be in a content system with tags to pull out on the basis of intelligent rules. This was just a first pass at the thinking about moving forward in content for those who currently create courses with authoring tools as one large ‘thing’. And, of course, an experiment in creating a video. Thanks for the feedback!