Learning Trends 2011 - Your turn.

from J Hruby, Director of Marketing

on January 21, 2011

3 comments

We've posted a new article over on the Articles page: Learning Trends - Where will they lead in 2011? If you haven't already, head over there and take a look.

And now give us your comments. Or even post a prediction of your own and let us see where you think the learning and development community is headed this year.

Over to you.

Comments

One of the trends that I see developing among the clients we are working with is the continued trend to break learning content into smaller and smaller pieces for delivery.  The ability to provide “just in time” learning through selecting and reviewing just the right topic at the right time is increasingly becoming an expressed need by customers.

Personally, I applaud this trend as it is giving learners what they want in the time of need. The trick will be to figure out the best way to string together these sharable content objects into broader lessons.  But that’s what SCORM was designed to do.

As this trend increases, I can’t help but see that the dissimilarities between eLearning and mLearning will be bridged.  Once we create smaller pieces of content, we have the ability to create discrete pieces from them that can be more easily deployed in a mobile environment.  Plus, these smaller content objects will have the potential to develop into performance support pieces, which fullfills the vision that Tony Tao sees for mLearning.

by Robin Lucas
on January 26, 2011 - 3:05

I would have to respectfully disagree that adoption of the iPad as a learning device will be slow in 2011. Colleges have already started to deploy them, as have corporations and public school systems.

I work for a large online learning company and the iPad is considered the single most important device to us in terms of its impact to our business for the foreseeable future. Companies like Blackboard and Rapid Intake (as well as many others) are rushing to get their products optimized or at least compatible with iOS devices. We’ve already made large alterations to our own product line that makes our products more compatible with the iPad and other iOS devices and will be continuing to do so.

Android tablets will indeed provide an alternative for those clinging to a legacy of Flash content or those unwilling to adapt and change quickly, sure. They are not necessarily cheaper, however, when you factor in build quality, reliability, ease-of-use, etc. Many of the flagship challengers to the iPad are being released at price points actually above the iPad, not to mention the moving target that is each different vendor’s implementation of the hardware and Android OS.

Given all these points, I cannot honestly believe that many companies will invest large amounts of money and effort into targeting a device like the Archos over the iPad. As far as video is concerned, Flash has already been displaced as the primary method for distribution. It won’t take much longer for interactivity to follow suit - there’s simply too much money to be made for whoever comes up with the best HTML5 interactive authoring tools. It may well turn out to be Adobe themselves who leads the way.

Personally, I think the iPad (and iOS overall) adoption as an eLearning platform will happen much quicker than many entrenched Flash developers would like to see.

by Rick Jayx
on February 07, 2011 - 2:05

IMHO you’ve got the right aenwsr!

by Sequoia
on May 02, 2011 - 11:41

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