Knowledge Management Self-Study Course

Taking the training out of the corporate LMS

I spent a decade building enablement programs for publisher and coach networks at Symantec and Broadcom. That material was good, and it lived entirely inside corporate training systems where only employees could reach it.

This course is that methodology rewritten for anyone: twelve lessons, about an hour, free, open at a URL. Eight lessons cover knowledge management fundamentals as practitioners actually use them. Four more apply it to AI-era content strategy.

Why the last four lessons exist

The KM fundamentals are stable — they were true before language models and they stayed true after.

What changed is the audience. Structured content is now read by models synthesizing answers as much as by people searching. The disciplines that made knowledge bases work — clear titles, scoped articles, resolution-oriented structure, consistent metadata — turn out to be exactly the disciplines that make content usable by a model. Generative SEO and answer engine optimization are mostly KCS practices under new names, and that’s the argument the course closes on.

Built so a lesson is just writing

Lessons are typed data: content, key points and a knowledge check for each one. An Astro page renders them and handles progress tracking, a sticky progress bar, lesson navigation, and quiz feedback for both correct and incorrect answers. Content is authored in markdown and parsed at build time, so adding a lesson means writing prose rather than markup.

I built the delivery layer instead of using an LMS because the scope called for it. The course opens at a link and runs on a phone — that’s the entire enrollment process. For a free, hour-long course, keeping the path from curiosity to first lesson down to one click matters more than anything an LMS would add.

Designing the instruction and building the thing that delivers it were the same job here, which is much of the point.