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Thursday, April 05, 2007

eLearning Business Alternatives - Good Discussion

An interesting conversation is starting around this month's big question -ILT and Off-the-Shelf Vendors – What Should They Do?

Tom Haskins is telling us that we had better: Leave a clean corpse
Now that I have pictured ILT and Off-the-Shelf Vendors as obsolete, the question remains how long their customers will pretend the world has not already changed this dramatically.
Valerie Bock counters with Formal Content: It's not dead yet!
I think there will always be value in taking time out to figure out where the gaps exist between what people need to know and need to be able to do, and where they actually are. And there will always be a place for well-designed, formal content, prepared by people who have taken the time to find out what works for adult learners, in the quest to fill those gaps.
Even Valerie in her defense seems to acknowledge that the trend is towards alternatives to courses and courseware. So, what do you do to take advantage of a move to alternatives? Tom responds with Preparing for changing opportunities.

What I'm quickly realizing is how important this conversation really is and it's far beyond ILT and OTS Vendors - it's all of us. It's a question of what will be happening. Take a look at George Siemens post - Is Print Dying? from a day or so ago and not in any way part of the Big Question. Among other things he says:
The challenges of media are providing valuable lessons for education. Any industry that has formerly viewed content as the key value point - media, newspapers, education, museums, libraries - are in the middle of a substantial shift. ...content changes too rapidly to be our value point.
But many of us define ourselves in terms of our ability to produce content. Looking back at my posts Disruptive Changes in Learning and Content Vendor Value - this is really a WOW topic.

And, unfortunately, I'm going to be missing part of this conversation because of a trip to NYC and Boston. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for your tip

Anonymous said...

What a great find Tony, as I am deeply concerned about e-Learning and use it extensively. I was deeply hopeful that the field would adopt new ideas about the human brain to distinguish itself as it seemed an opputune time to leave traditional glitches in learning and assessment behind. Yet, sadly, I see more - the swish for money - that limits learning approaches that could change our nation Online.

Great post - thanks! I look forward to learning more about your ideas that can bring e-learning learning and assessment to the curriculum levels current brain based approaches could offer. Thoughts?

Anonymous said...

A very interesting talk in Boston, Tony - thank you. I find that I agree with you - e-Learning 2.0 tools and techniques are immensely valuable, transformational forces to learning. But like Valerie Bock, I don't think the course is going to be dead for a long time. More on my blog...e-Learning 2.0 - The End of the Course?