Contents of Government Elearning! Magazine - NOV-DEC 2011

Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.

Page 16 of 52

'Need for Speed' Is Driving the Next Generation of E-learning
Industry Trends 2012
WORKERS NEED AVAILABILITY OF A LEARNING ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH THEY CAN FIND INFO, COLLABORATE AND BUILD THEIR OWN LEARNING PLANS.
BY DAVID MALLON
A new era of corporate e-learning is emerging — one in which e-learning is used to support on-the-job performance first, and first-time learning second. In today's fast-paced business environment, the flow of information is growing so quickly that the relevance of learning pro- grams is based as much on speed and timeliness as it is on instructional rigor. The "need for speed" in most of today's
training organizations is accelerating due to several other disruptive trends that are driving the $12 billion e-learning market. These trends include the evolution of the Internet into a highly interactive, collabo- rative and social technology that has gone
16 November / December 2011 Government Elearning!
mainstream; the continued rapid growth and widespread adoption of new e-learn- ing technologies, including mobile and virtual classrooms; and the continued evo- lution of video as a learning tool.
AN ONGOING EVOLUTION
It may help to put these trends in perspec- tive by looking at where e-learning has been. Bersin & Associates previously defined e-learning as "…any form of cor- porate training that uses Internet-based technology for delivery, management and measurement." E-learning initially appealed to corporate training managers primarily for its ability to reduce costs
associated with travel and instructor-led training and to improve the scalability of training programs. Today's interactive, collaborative, social
Web shifts the practice of delivering or "pushing" training to learners — often in the form of traditional self-paced e-learn- ing. Instead, learners "pull" the informa- tion they need at the time they need it.
NEXT-GENERATION E-LEARNING
The core of this next-generation e-learning is centered on the interest of the learner and often generated by the learner. In short, e-learning no longer is simply a tra- ditional self-paced alternative to classroom