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EPISODE 118: SOLVING CONTENT DISTRIBUTION PROBLEMS
Tammy Rutherford, CEO, Rustici Software
Digital learning content is exploding. And as AI pours gasoline on the fire, most learning organizations are still trying to manage this content distribution crisis with workflows built for a single LMS in 2004.
The result? A hidden “admin tax” that is quickly draining time, budget, and sanity across the extended enterprise. What can you do to get ahead of this issue?
That’s what I’m discussing here with Tammy Rutherford, CEO of Rustici Software. For decades, Tammy and her team have worked behind the scenes to help learning systems work better together. And she understands this challenge from the inside out.
So, join us as we dig deeper on this episode of Talented Learning Show…
SOLVING CONTENT DISTRIBUTION PROBLEMS — KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Many learning organizations produce massive volumes of content for diverse audiences, with courses in multiple formats and languages. The related administrative burden is a logistical nightmare. It’s essentially a content supply chain challenge that demands continuous synchronization, versioning, governance, and multi‑system distribution.
- The content “admin tax” is real, and it’s spreading fast. Updating a single course across multiple systems often involves dozens of manual steps. AI accelerates content creation and translation, but it also multiplies the number of versions to maintain, so the admin burden becomes exponentially worse.
- SCORM-era workflows weren’t built for this kind of scale. SCORM was designed for a single LMS environment, not for distributing content across dozens of customer, partner, or regional systems. When content lives in multiple platforms, manual administrative processes break. This is why centralized distribution is essential for managing content accuracy and version control without drowning in duplicated SCORM files.
SOLVING CONTENT DISTRIBUTION PROBLEMS — Q&A HIGHLIGHTS
Welcome, Tammy. Rustici Software is behind some of the most widely used technology in the learning sphere. But the brand isn’t well-known. So, could you start with a brief overview?
Perfect, John. Our company is named after our founder, Mike Rustici, who started the business back in 2002. At that time, we focused on making content and platforms work together by leveraging technical standards many learning professionals know, like SCORM, xAPI, and LTI.
Originally, we solved this problem for LMS platforms that needed to play SCORM content, as well as for content publishers, providers, and authoring tools that needed the same compatibility.
Now, fast forward. In 2026, we define our use cases a bit more broadly. As you mentioned, how does Rustici fit in underneath all of these transactions?
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Great question…
Well, our customers implement our software because it acts like plumbing to ensure their products work better across the industry.
For example, when you take an online course, there’s a good chance it has been created with an authoring tool like Articulate or Captivate, both of which use our software. And when you launch that content in any LMS platform, it is most likely played and tracked with our software under the hood, as well.
You’ll rarely see us, if at all. And if you do see us, something’s broken. But we try to prevent that.
So, you don’t make learning systems. You just make them better…
Exactly.
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Now, after years of focusing exclusively on establishing and embedding standards, you’ve found another huge problem with content distribution. Who’s dealing with this issue and why?
Well, I won’t go into all the technical details. But to understand this challenge, it is important to know a few things:
First, the SCORM standard was designed when courses were delivered in only one LMS, where employees and others would go for online training. SCORM works very well for that use case, where the content and the platform play on the same server.
Yep…
But now, content often needs to go out to multiple LMSs.
For example, if you’re a learning content publisher, most of your customers have their own systems where they want your content to play. Broadcasting a course to multiple systems is where the term federated or distributed content applies.
But the SCORM standard was not designed well for that use case. It quickly becomes difficult to maintain.
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Right…
We saw this over time, with publishers who wanted to share files out with their customers. They would create multiple copies of a course. That may be fine for a few courses. But as you grow, maintaining and updating those courses soon gets unwieldy.
Plus, tracking and visibility create even more challenges. If you want to know how many people have taken a course or who’s completing it, that’s not difficult within one LMS. But when a course lives in multiple systems, it becomes very complex very quickly.
The biggest issue involves managing growth at scale. As your business or your catalog expands, the challenge increases exponentially if you don’t stay ahead of it.
So, we started looking at ways to help. Could we provide a way to manage content in one location and share access across multiple systems, but remove the friction that comes with handing off full course files?
Interesting. I can imagine at least three major use cases…
Yes. Some organizations accumulate more LMSs than they realize. That’s because they acquired those systems intentionally or accidentally, or they kept them around longer than intended.
Think about mergers and acquisitions, where legacy platforms become part of an ecosystem, and they’re slow to retire, if ever.
Also, many organizations are improving their partner enablement and customer education programs. So, now they’re not only training employees, but external audiences as well. And that means more systems are coming into their world through partners and customers.
There’s also the challenge of LMS migration, and how content plays in that scenario. We may want to unpack that a little later, here…
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Well, let’s talk about customer education or training business scenarios. If we spend lots of time creating a university in our own LMS, why shouldn’t we make people come to us?
Fair question. That’s not uncommon. Organizations may think their content performs best in their own application or in a particular way. So, they say, “Come to us.”
But increasingly, learners are less likely to go outside of their systems, whether it’s because that adds friction to their journey, or because their organization doesn’t want them to use outside systems for security purposes.
Sure…
But most importantly, it’s about the learner experience.
Organizations are focusing heavily on making sure their users have the best experience. If you don’t have to come to them, that’s one less obstacle. So, there’s a better chance the learner will launch their course and engage with their content.
Interested in Rustici? Check reviews, demos and more in our independent Learning Systems Directory! SEE THE PROFILE →
Definitely, learning in the flow of work is a key driver. If you break that flow, you break someone’s concentration. If they need to remember where to go for access, or need to retrieve passwords, good luck…
Yes, exactly.
And what does the mother organization get if they send their learners away? Without data, they won’t know the results, so they can’t be strategic. They’re just paying for content, hoping it will make a difference.
Great point. We talk about visibility and tracking but they’re two sides of the same equation. When people have to leave an ecosystem to take training elsewhere, their organization may not have visibility into how much time those people actually spent taking those courses.
That metric is important, along with understanding what actually happens in those sessions. So, tracking and visibility are critical to training providers, as well as the organizations they serve.
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So, how does AI change this picture? Much more content is being generated now. Is this why learning organization are tripping into the hidden “admin tax” you talk about?
It’s important to consider that learning content, courseware, whatever you call it, now comes in many shapes and sizes.
Back in the day, we converted PowerPoint into a 30-60 minute elearning course. Those probably still exist. But now we see multimodal formats — video, microlearning, and beyond.
Ultimately, it’s all knowledge management. It’s information your audiences need. Employees, customers, partners, everyone. So, you want to be sure it’s not only valuable but accurate.
Mmhmm…
You touched on two things worth unpacking. One is accuracy and the other is the volume of whatever you’ve created. When you put those two things together, it becomes an exponential challenge to keep up with.
To illustrate what I mean, I’ll break it down:
The information you put out into the world is probably going to change. Product specs will change, your messaging will change, and so forth. And every time, you’ll want to update that content to keep it fresh and accurate.
The “admin tax” starts to show up here, when you consider what has to happen to make sure those updates get to the end user, the learner.
There are wild stories about what it takes to make a change to a course in an LMS. We’ve heard it takes 58 steps. I haven’t done the forensics on that. It seems a bit high.
Wow.
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However, I don’t think people fully appreciate what is involved. The process is fairly manual.
Making the change is easy. But getting the change to the end learner is the hard part that people tend to forget.
A lot of things come with managing change at scale. And fully appreciating the complexity that can come with updating courses is part of that admin tax…
No doubt.
You also touched on where AI fits in. I think there are wonderful opportunities here.
For instance, think about language translations. Some barriers to entry have been reduced, so more organizations can now offer courses in multiple languages. The cost has certainly come down. And turnaround time is accelerating, so it’s becoming more accessible.
But that leads to the scale problem we just mentioned. People who previously managed one course may now be offering that training in 10 languages. That’s really 10 courses. But it’s a different version of one title in multiple languages.
And we haven’t even talked about creating more types of content yet…
Yeah. All of this seems monumental from an admin tax standpoint. What kind of content distribution strategy can help organizations deal with all this complexity? …
… For complete answers to this and other questions about next-level learning content distribution, listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Amazon, or right here on our site.
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