Asset manager – bulk uploads

• Home
• Blog
• Learning & Development

Libby Cross, Senior Marketing Executive

Earlier this year, we sat down with some of our Learning Pool Authoring users and identified ways in which we could improve their workflow and make the building of content more efficient.

The first major overhaul in this process was the inclusion of a review feature in Learning Pool Authoring that would allow content creators to get direct feedback from their reviewers within the tool. This made the review process much easier but didn’t really provide an improvement when building content.

As we discussed the process of building content with users, we identified a number of areas that were causing issues and could be improved upon.

One of these areas was the asset manager.The asset manager in Learning Pool Authoring is an online repository for all image, videos and documents that are used in Learning Pool Authoring content. This makes it easy to store and access your assets. When building your content it’s easy to upload assets when you need them, however, we recognise that not everyone works in the same way.

We found that the process for individually uploading images was quite time-consuming for some users. As they had worked extensively on pre-planning their content, when they came to build, they already had all of their assets ready to be uploaded.

The course creators would manually upload every individual asset into the asset manager, one at a time, providing an asset title, an asset description, adding tags and also licences.  In most cases, we found that the asset description was simply a duplicate of the asset title and was only included as it was a required field. We recognised that the descriptions can be a benefit to some users but why slow the users down? Why not remove the required option for this field and allow the users more freedom in uploading assets?

During this process, we also found that adding tags and licences to assets were fraught with potential pitfalls. We are all prone to user error and it’s very simple to misspell a tag, overlook a licence or even select the wrong licence. This would mean that when searching for images it wasn’t always easy to find them, as you could be looking for the wrong tag.We looked at the best way to manage this and realised that having a bulk upload of assets could streamline the entire process by allowing all the images to be uploaded at the same time. This meant you only needed to enter a tag once, select a licence once and all of your images would be given the exact same properties ensuring that you could easily access the correct assets when building a course.

We weren’t looking to re-invent the wheel with this process and initially, we were planning on having a file picker that would open an explorer window for you to select your assets but as we experimented with this option we recognised that we could make this even better by including a drag and drop editor for the assets.

The results of the research and experimentation with this solution have resulted in an overhaul of how assets are uploaded. You can now easily drop an entire folder of images into the editor, add a tag and select a licence in a matter of minutes.

Have a look at the video below to see the upload of 94 images in one batch.Before this update, uploading these assets would have taken around 45 minutes, estimating 30 seconds to name and upload each item. This update has seen a marked improvement in the workflow for our graphics team as well as increased productivity, we are sure you will also see an improvement in building your own content.

These changes are all part of usability improvements we have planned for Learning Pool Authoring and are the beginning steps in making content creation easier for everyone.

We hope you enjoy it and look forward to building on these improvements to enrich your experience with Learning Pool Authoring.

Our catalogue content is continually improving and growing – ensuring you have the modules you need.

View our e-learning catalogues here to check our latest content.