E-learning 2.0

By Frank Mulligan ñ Accetis International, Talent Software & Recruit China

We have all heard a lot about how E-Learning is having a big impact on corporate education, but many people, myself included, believe that it has never lived up to its promise.

I mean, ask yourself, how many people do you know in China who are actually using E-Learning?. Or even using skills testing?

China seems like an obvious fit with a huge population and a strong economic growth for the last 20 years. As a direct consequence China has a huge training gap. But E-Learning still has not taken off in a big way here, or even at all. The situation in the US or Europe seems to be the same in that E-Learning has still not achieved mainstream status, and that after about 5-7 years of development.

Now comes Rapid E-Learning and E-learning 2.0.

These two approaches seem to be quite hot now but for rapid e-learning all it means is that the content for the training is rapidly developed, and of course cheaply. Not that much of a difference and certainly no great paradigm change. E-learning 2.0, on the other hand, is much more interesting and it involves the introduction of social software into the mix.

Students themselves actually create content, which is a big step forward. They also collaborate with each other using blogs, Wikis, threaded discussions, RSS etc.

This adds a huge base of people to tackle the content creation problem and it brings on board people who actually perform the work that is being trained for. These new entrants can definitely be considered experts into their field, certainly much more so than many content creators who typically have an educational, HR or IT background.

The logic of all this is that the high cost of content development was hindering the development of E-Learning and these new approaches will solve the problem.

We will see.

If you want to know more, the players in this market include:

Articulate, Lersus, Macromedia Breeze, WebCT, TutorVista SNAP! Studio, Content Point, Webex Mindflash, Adaptive Curriculum, Authorware, FirstClass, Knowledge Forum LMSDirect, Scholar360, Studywiz, Thinking Cap

Enjoy! Ö

Email frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com
Frank Mulliganís blog - english.talent-software.com