Technological breakthroughs make new tools available; whole industries change and professions disappear. In few areas is this transformative power more evident than in information creation and knowledge transfer.
During the 1990s, the publishing industry was shredded and recycled by the forces unleashed by the personal computer and desktop publishing. Now the newspaper industry is being dismantled by the Internet, with its combination of zero-cost distribution and grassroots reporting by anyone with something to say.
In both cases, technological change tore up the rulebook and created new possibilities for information transfer. Subject Matter Experts were liberated; quite suddenly they could create their own content faster and better without having to go through middlemen or mediators as they had in the past.
These same forces are shaking up the area of e-learning as well. Here are three predictions about how I believe our industry will melt into thin air in the coming years.
1. End of term for e-learning
The term ‘e-learning’ is going to disappear, because different people will be using these tools, people who see the world a different way.
What we think of e-learning is a particular type of content, delivered in a training setting and created by e-learning specialists. But instead of e-learning merging with other forms of learning, as has been predicted, the technology will slip out of the control of learning specialists and be used by the people for the people (or rather by the employees for the employees).
Subject Matter Experts will be the ones creating the content, and they won’t call it e-learning, or even learning. For example, a product manager might inform sales people how to present the benefits of a new product to the customer. To transfer that knowledge she might build an interactive page that demonstrates ways of dealing with customers when selling the product. E-learning specialists might define this as e-learning, but to the product manager it’s just a useful form of communication. Insisting on calling such communications 'e-learning' is already starting to sound anachronistic.
2. Bespoke content: RIP
Rapid e-learning is already wreaking havoc among bespoke e-learning companies. Adding a fully-fledged recession on top of this upheaval will surely mean the decline of the bespoke content houses that used to dominate the e-learning business.
Once there was a thriving industry that specialised in creating presentations for use with overhead projectors. PowerPoint and the LCD projector killed that business. Today, most presentations are created by the people who deliver them. Bespoke e-learning is already starting to going the same way. After all, why outsource this activity to someone with no real knowledge of your business? Why pay a team of people a fortune to create by hand what can easily be achieved with software?
3. Seeing through the magic of instructional design
As Subject Matter Experts create more interactive content, the magic of 'e-learning' will evaporate and demand for e-learning professionals will diminish.
The software solutions used to create effective interactive content will have more and better guides, templates and wizards to help the Subject Matter Experts who use them. Several rapid e-learning solutions on the market, including our own Mohive eLPS, already have a lot of instructional design embedded.
That might seem like a gloomy prospect for the secret society of instructional designers: those magicians of learning design, wizards of interactivity, high priests of quality and wielders of Kirkpatrick’s orbs of power! What will happen to them?
The secret society of instructional designers, the wielders of Kirkpatrick’s orbs of power! What will happen to them?
I don’t think they will disappear completely, but they will have to change their role. I believe we are already in a transitional period. Many instructional designers are acting less as authors and more as enablers, as they coach and project manage Subject Matter Experts to create content and distribute knowledge for themselves. I think this flexible, pragmatic approach is better for everyone than the old proprietorial, even mystical, attitude.
The rapid tidal wave
My predictions are based on ways in which we’re seeing rapid e-learning change the e-learning industry by:
- Equipping Subject Matter Experts with the tools to create effective content themselves.
- Enabling content to be created from the bottom up, instead of being driven by large budgets and high-end aspirations from the top of the organization.
- Escaping the confines of HR to offer other parts of the business an efficient way to communicate changes to products and procedures.
I might be extrapolating these trends too far – to date rapid e-learning has meant more work for instructional designers as they are freed from the constraints of needing large teams of programmers to create content. Most organizations have yet to find a way to tap into the huge knowledge pool that Subject Matter Experts represent, and rapid e-learning software platforms are still called ‘e-learning’ solutions.
But looking at our customers, I can see the seeds of these trends beginning to sprout. Several of them have had great success using our coaching programme, where experienced instructional designers, either internally or from Mohive, act as coaches to help Subject Matter Experts create their first content. This approach has proven very effective: it establishes best practice that gets picked up by other business areas and helps to spread the application of our solution outside the traditional confines of e-learning. The Mohive eLPS is increasingly being used to communicate about new products, promotions or procedures – and, more often than not, this happens independently of the training department.
So forget about ‘e-learning’ and think instead about a dramatic shift to rapid knowledge transfer
I can also see the gap between high-end content and rapid e-learning content being broken down; several of our customers are using Mohive eLPS to create content that can’t be told apart from bespoke content, which supports my view that the days of bespoke are numbered.
So, forget about ‘e-learning’ and think instead about a dramatic shift to rapid knowledge transfer, one that allows people in large organizations to share their knowledge and drive business results directly. Although we might be in the initial stages of this transformation, change is in the air.