Tony Karrer is the guy behind elearninglearning.com a community where he gathers all kinds of blogs about e-Learning, He also is the blogmeister of the Learning Circuits community. On that community he runs a series of post regarding ‘The big question’. The question of the month is: What are your Predictions and Plans for 2011? He asked me to write a blog with my view, so here it is.
My predictions
I see some important changes developing in the world of e-Learning. I don’t think that 2011 will be a year of great transformations but these changes will slowly gain importance.
2011 Moving from the LMS to the workplace
I believe that in the long-term we will move from formal learning (courses in a LMS or classroom) more and more towards just-in-time workplace learning that supports the informal learning processes. Formal learning will always be there, but now it is the main or only focus of e-Learning. I believe that focus will shift.
Form courses to nuggets and collaboration
In order to make this shift we need to change we our approach to e-Learning. In stead of well designed complete courses with a beginning and a end, you will see more and more smaller ‘nuggets’ of training, best practices and knowledge. These nuggets will often be made by learners and subject matter experts. This will (over time) change the role of the professional e-Learning author. In stead of creating complete courses he will be coaching learners and Sme’s and his writing role will become more an editorial role. The courses that remain will (should) become more and more adaptive.
Disclosure of content: capturing context
A lot of the learning content will no longer be published through a LMS, but through portals, help functions and knowledge systems. Form the context of the work a query will be made into our content database, we have to deliver the appropriate answer to that query. This is a challenge, it means we have to focus on adding keywords in a structural way to pieces of content; we need to get involved in metadata and taxonomies.
Plans
2011 will be a crucial year for easygenerator. We want to make the step from a regional player (The Netherlands, Germany and the UK) to a global player. We will drastically increase our partner network and start selling in as many countries as possible. (Interested? Drop me an email!).
We will focus on facilitating collaboration better, we will make the first step at capturing user-generated content and feed that back to the author and we will create a Publication platform, that can deliver content to the LMS (SCORM) and to all kind of other systems. In order to do that metadata will be an important attention point.
This means a lot of innovative thinking and developing. We do not want to do that on our own and we don’t want to invent the wheel all over again. Therefore I created a LinkedIn group called the ‘e-learning piranhas‘. This group is aimed at collaborating on those ideas to make them more concrete, sharing our knowledge and insights, and creating partnerships that can convert these ideas into tools. Please join, if you want more details, please read my blogpost on this subject or contact me.
The Learning 2019 conference
I have been to a ton of learning conferences but this will be my first time at #learning2019. I’m looking forward to it and I’m planning to report on all interesting sessions via this blog.
