Technology Change in eLearning

By David Shaw

eLearning has been in a period of stagnation characterised by an explosion in the learning management systems (LMS) sector (>300 in the market) and an implosion in the backend learning content-management systems (LCMS) sector (~6 in the market). This might seem like a contradiction but the 300 have brought no new big ideas about training and cost reduction and the LCMS vendors are still building complex information silos that discourage easy re-use of content.

Outside the largest organizations eLearning is still shackled by human-resource departments that (astoundingly!) don’t know how to train; corporate IT departments that are zoo-keepers who only know how to feed caged Microsoft software, and who believe that eLearning is PowerPoints best delivered on SharePoint; and in the eLearning space itself a waterfall process for developing courses that can often take more than six weeks and sometimes months for a one-hour course.

Maybe it's time for change.

“We live in a time of profound transition, when the future of everything is up in the air,” says Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in aPost-Fact Society.

That future is being shaped not by old nation-states but by the ‘five’ horsemen of technology: Apple (1976), Amazon (1994), Facebook (2004), Google (1998), and Samsung (1938). Together these rival companies define the global markets for cloud services; mobile devices like smartphones, eReaders and tablets; mobile apps; and social networking.

Riding in the dust in the company of strangers is Microsoft, struggling to redefine itself as a hardware company that can make hip fondleslabs that people actually want to buy. Windows still rules in corporate mindshare but it’s a slideshow everywhere else.

Android and iOS rule in operating systems for mobile phones and tablets, riding well ahead of the distant pack of QNX, Bada, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux (in order of market share). As an aside, Android, iOS, QNX and Linux all have an ancestry in Unix.

Other mobile operating systems coming soon are BB10, Firefox, Jolla, Tizen, and Ubuntu. And of course there is Google Chromebook.

Yes, companies rise and fall but what distinguishes these five horsemen is that they are extremely successful in all their aspects, and especially in innovation. Nobody else comes close.

Besides the decline of Windows and a proliferation of platforms, what are the key changes driven by the horsemen's technology that impact content-management in general and eLearning in specific? The most notable ones are:

• Rise of Mobile Media
• Demise of Flash
• Responsive Web Design
• Content is a Commodity
• Computing is a Commodity

 A PDF of the complete article discussing these factors is available by email from the author.