G-Cube Blog

In response to this month’s big question on LCB – e-Learning implementation and usage of different upcoming platforms is at different adoption level in different regions, and hence it becomes difficult to generalize how 2010 will pan out for our industry. I have thus categorized my thoughts on geographical basis.

India –

1. Skill Development Programs – Many government bodies at both center and state level initiated skill development programs on mass scale in collaboration with private sector in 2009. I see some of them taking off the ground this year and benefiting hundreds of thousands of youths who so far could not find meaningful jobs.
2. e-Learning Adoption in Government Bodies to Increase – Many PSU’s who are leaders in their own domains started implementing elearning in 2009, e.g. Punjab National Bank, State Bank of India, Department of Post etc. As they successfully implement the systems over next few months, I see lot of activity from other entities in these respective domains to implement similar systems in their organizations. State education boards are already very actively implementing smart classrooms and I see this only growing hereon.
3. Traditional Sectors to implement Training Management Systems – Tech savvy sectors, such as BFSI, IT/ITeS, Healthcare and Telecom etc have reached ‘Early Majority’ stage in technology adoption cycle and this will continue to grow. Something that I think will be different in 2010 will be that traditional sectors, such as Manufacturing, FMCG, and Energy etc will start adopting elearning more vigorously. They would however start with implementing training management systems to better manage their classroom trainings, and slowly build elearning practice in their organizations. In my opinion this would essentially be because of lack of relevant and ‘Indianised’ content for these domains.
4. Online Examinations – After CAT fiasco this year (or the media attention that it got), other examination bodies, such as IIT JEE, MAT etc will wait for another year I think before they start moving from paper based examinations. However, organizations on individual level would use online assessments much more in 2010 to certify their employees, or to help them evaluate their skill gaps (Almost all of our Wizdom clients, including PSU’s, ask for and use/intend to use Assessments vigorously).
5. Social Learning & M-Learning – Innovators will adopt them in 2010, but these platforms are still sometime away from mass adoption – on both corporate & individual level.

US & Parts of Europe –

1. eBooks – Amazon sold more eBooks than physical books, and Kindle was the top selling gift item ever this Christmas. Many more products are coming in the market & Apple is set to announce its new tablet shortly. All this makes 2010 a very interesting year for eBooks growth, which I believe is set to explode now.
2. m-Learning – As I had mentioned in one of my earlier posts also, we are now developing lot of content for iPhones & Blackberries, and the requests are only growing by the day. Apart from this personal experience, there are off-the-shelf m-learning content providers emerging on the scene. All this, combined with technology advancements, such as embedded Pico Projectors can make 2010 a year when m-Learning got its due share.
3. Rapid Content – Scars of recession are fresh and are not going to heal in a hurry. Cost cutting is and will remain name of the game for some time. Standardization and rapid content development, while keeping tight focus on instructional design is going to be the prevalent content development mode in 2010.
4. Search for ‘Magic Learning System’ – 70% of LMS users are unhappy with their systems. They are ugly & confusing. Social Learning is the ‘new’ way to learn & LMS’s don’t know what to do about it. Well, poor LMS has been everyone’s favourite punching bag for couple of years now. But the world currently doesn’t have an alternative for very important question from organization perspective – how to track and control learner’s movements (Yes, I know, this is not how it ideally should be – but please tell that to HR Departments & to learners who take undue advantage of liberties provided to them). Search for ‘Magic Learning System’ is on and will continue in 2010 (and we may actually see some answers too – SCORM/E-Learning cloud is one such emerging thought) which can be integrated with popular social platforms and provide a way to provide controlled access and objectively analyse learner progress in bridging her skill gaps.

So, this is what I think how 2010 is going to be. Would love to hear your thoughts & feedback.

December’s question on Learning Circuit Blog is “What did you learn about learning this year”.

Well the most important thing I learnt this year – World Never Stops Learning.

Here are some of the things that stand out for me from 2009 -

Recession didn’t turn out be that bad a word after all - Due to recession, year 2009 started on a low note for industry in general and elearning/training industry in particular (training sadly still is not on priority list of most of CFO’s).

However, I learnt that inspite of all the doomsday prophecies, any downturn is generally limited to certain verticals & geographies. During this downturn BFSI & real estate got hit badly in US & some parts of Europe, whereas India, China, and many other countries went through this period without any serious problem. So for us even though business from US & Europe dipped a bit, many opportunities came up in emerging markets. My Learning – Continue to build organizational expertise across different verticals, and diversify across different geographies because world won’t stop learning.

Rapid Learning Ruled in West, Flash in East – e-Learning in west has attained a certain maturity level, and that was also reflected in the way elearning courses were developed and delivered in these geographies – course duration got shorter & shorter (we developed a lot of 5-7 minute modules for our customers in 2009), delivery platform diversified (courses were simultaneously, or in some cases exclusively, designed for iPhone & Blackberry etc), and majority of construction got done using rapid tools or highly standardized templates & shells.

In east however, elearning took off over last couple of years and HR teams are trying hard to hook learners to this training medium.  Thus, elearning courses most often don’t only have to fulfil learning objectives, but also have to act as an advertisement for this training medium, which translates into lot of Level 2 or 3 courses being developed using Flash. My Learning – Due to inequality in elearning adoption rate, this trend would continue for some more time before it converges. As a service company, we need to cater to different kind of requests, but seeing the trend, need to further develop organizational strength in designing and delivering short courses over different platforms.

Social Learning Gained Momentum – Before 2009, I was sceptic if collaborative learning would be accepted in work environment. But 2009 made me a believer that collaborative learning is going to be a major component of learning initiatives moving forward. On personal level, I blogged much more and was greatly enriched by the experience, tried my hands at twitter (not successfully though – which I plan to change in 2010), and generally got more active on other social platforms.

From business perspective, we started integrating collaborative learning components in our courses, and our clients started using collaboration features of installed LMS’s and freely available tools much more in 2009 with encouraging results. My Learning – Continue pushing usage of social learning – both at personal and organizational level – it’s a win-win.

Wishing all the readers of LCB & GCS Blog a very happy 2010!

Learning Circuits big question this month is on how to figure out value of social learning, and how do we encourage people to see it as an alternative training medium.

But hasn’t learning been always a social activity? From school to the workplace, the avenues of learning have always been through interaction. The closer the interaction, more effective is the learning. While this is established, what is the resistance in using social media as a learning tool?

For the traditionalists, the first fear is of the ‘new’. And if it is a new technology that we are talking about, the fear is greater. This however, in my opinion, is the easier of fears to break. Social media as a learning tool is not a completely new concept. It has been firmly established as a successful means to impart learning of subjects and topics, varied in nature. In fact, there are successful organizations, who swear by it. Giving such examples, would soothe out wrinkles in the ‘workability’ department.

Another way of essaying the fear would be to give a taste of the new. The idea is not to fight them but take them along. The most severe of the critics can be wooed over if the dish is nicely prepared. One of my favorite characters from my childhood books was Lucy, who hated melons. She had never had them, but she decided she hated them, till the day that she did try one. And then, she loved them! A simplistic approach to the problem, you say? Yes, and this too, is a tried and tested one. A short module can be run for a month or two, opening the avenues of learning through social media. At the end of the testing period the effectiveness can be evaluated and comments and suggestions can be invited.

The greater of the fears for the traditionalists is that of losing productivity. The existing systems are working well, and have shown results for the past many years. Why dismantle something that has been working so well? This as a fear is well grounded. Indeed, social mediums like facebook, twitter, blogs and wikis – all have their ‘fun’ part as well, may be too much of it. There are games, movies, music – every other distraction that you can think of. This is truly scary for a manager, to expect that all members would act productively given access to such medium. But again, such forums have the capability to increase many skills, an angle that needs to be shown to the skeptic ones.

While increasing skills like communication, creativity and leadership, social media also helps healthy interaction between people who might not have interacted at all in traditional hierarchy. Not to say that the top bosses do not want to talk to the employees, they just do not have the time. A blog can be a social forum where every member of a team can participate, have their say and at the end of the day, learn from each other.

So, to summarize, to convince a group who hasn’t got any exposure to social medium, give them a taste of it. You might be pleasantly surprised with the outcome! And to convince a group who has some exposure and thus a view, that is none too positive – give the right exposure. This might not be easy, but it is definitely possible, with some dedicated spearheading by the pushers of social media as a learning tool.

The LCB’s Big Question of the month is “What is the impact of the economy on you and your organization? What are you doing as a result? Here is my response -

Impact on me:

I personally seek opportunity in adversity so I am very optimistic about this phase. Since I am one of the key shareholders in an eLearning business, impact on me in short term (12-18 months) will be the reflection of impact on my organisation as a whole. 

What am I doing:

So my worry is not of survival but how to create value during this phase and focus will remain that throughout this period. At personal level I intend to devote sometime to a universal mission which I had conceptualised and planned a year ago-GymForSoul.  

Impact on my organisation:

So far our organisation has not been impacted in revenue terms. However adverse impact is visible on two counts – significant hardening in penetrating new customers and increase in credit period. As a result we have more working capital invested in business now and we see this to increase further.

What my organisation is doing:

Caution bug has hit us so hard that we are proactively trying to optimise the cost – we are focusing on reducing our non performing assets (everyone carries some flab so did we) at the same time we are hiring the quality talent. We are offering cost effective and flexible solutions to our customers.

Our focus at this point is to offer best value to customers and develop some innovative solutions for long term.

In response to this month’s question on LCB -  

There is not much to predict when recession is written on the wall – It is rather etched there in BIG & BOLD. This is particularly true when my area of interest is business prediction- and today it can be predicted in one word i.e. “RED”.

Though there is an established viewpoint that businesses should use this low phase as an opportunity to build human capital through increased L&D activities, this is an ideal strategy which is less practiced than thought and talked. Practically, such sanity is feasible only during moderate and short lived recession. This recession is certainly not a moderate one neither will it be short lived (I see pain to persist over next 18 months).

Persistent recessionary conditions leave no room for building long term value such as human capital as fear and pessimism takeover the control over strategic decision functions. At this phase organisations’ start behaving instinctively in the short term interest-to placate shareholders sentiment and ensure survival.  Only action then is to reduce the budgets on all non urgent activities (even at the cost of long term value).

L&D suffers such onslaught of instinctive pessimisms. How much of it will affect eLearning consumption will depend on a deeper analysis.

Impact of recession on eLearning consumption will not be uniform across global corporate world. It will be different for various industry verticals across geographies and sizes.

I am choosing to predict eLearning consumption for the different classes of companies based on their eLearning maturity levels:-  

To predict the impact on eLearning, a deeper analysis of constituents becomes important.  For simplicity let us divide the eLearning market into four classes:-

1. Leaders – This class comprises of organisations having established eLearning practices over many years. There is a learning culture governed by the top management. eLearning infrastructure is in place and eLearning department is fairly structured with key learning team in place. Most importantly top management has realised the advantage of eLearning and remains committed for it. There is a strong ‘buy-in’ from learners, administrators and mentors. There are efficient systems in place for learning content development.
2. Early Followers – This class comprises of organisation which have adopted eLearning in last 2-3 years. Though they have eLearning infrastructure and practices in place, they are still away in terms of required maturity. This may be because of nascent learning culture, less than desired buy-in and wavering management commitment.
3. Late Followers – This class comprises of organisations which are late entrants – typically less than a year. Learning infrastructure is there but learning material is getting built. Stakeholders buy-in is yet to happen. Management is yet to see the complete cycle to realise the benefits of eLearning.
4. First Timers – As the name suggest these players are the once who will try eLearning for the first during 2009.

Overall business impact of recession on eLearning can be estimated by predicting individual impact on all these classes. Here, I need help from industry experts to provide authentic data in terms of % of eLearning revenue contribution by these classes. Sum of weighted impact will provide business prediction for the year 2009.

I predict that Leading players are likely to enhance the eLearning activity level in the year 2009 due to the following reasons:-

Having realised the advantages these players will continue to consume more rapid content, and also continue to accent on value curve with innovative and dynamic content. This category will be interested in the eLearning vendors who can offer high value propositions. They may listen to innovative business models to their advantage, volume discounts, and staggered payouts. This category will be the substantial consumer of any new experimentation- informal learning, use of mobile platform, simulations and virtual environments. Though, every single dollar will be spent with caution.

In my views this category will not reduce the eLearning consumption and net effect on revenue will be marginally higher say 15% or so.

Now guess what % of total eLearning revenue comes from this segment?

Middle category is likely to remain shaky because of the internal challenge of low ‘buy-ins’ and relatively less committed management. I predict this category may show moderate weakness on overall basis. Consumption here may go down by up to 25% in revenue terms.

Bottom category is where the most worry would be. This segment may dry much earlier than the other two. Because of the lowest management and employee buy-in, cost reduction drive will slash substantial L&D and budgets in absolute terms. This category may reduce the eLearning consumption by up to 40%. 

There is a 4th category the “First Timers”, who will be the fresh eLearning consumers in 2009. This will be the biggest causality from future potential perspective. Addition of new players will become extremely difficult. In my views contribution of first time eLearning consumers in 2009 revenue will at the lowest ebb compared to last 3 years.

I need relative contributions of these segments to predict the overall business impact on eLearning revenue. My broad guess is that it may not be a positive growth. Though for vendors who are committed to long terms value and serving leading players will be impacted the least with those having greater exposure with Late Followers suffering the most. If I were to have a wild estimate based on certain assumptions of revenue weights, business impact on eLearning for 2009 will be negative to the extent of -15%.

Assumptions:-

% of Revenue contribution by Leaders  : 50%
% of Revenue contribution by Early Followers : 25%
% of Revenue contribution by late Followers : 15%
% of Revenue contribution by First Timers : 10%

Focus on value creation will ensure the survival and growth for eLearning vendors in Year 2009. Probably this is the year when learning experts would need to learn the best techniques and method to achieve the optimum value for the global eLearning consumers. This is going to be the year of new paradigms. 

May industry see great times after this onslaught as the foundation for new inventions is set during this period! I believe it will happen as “Necessity is the mother of all invention” and there is no question about the greater necessity for “cost effective-high learning impact solutions” right now.

This month’s LCB question is – What would you like to do better as a Learning professional?

My answer – I want to do a better job of putting learner back into learning, whose interests are often the first casualty when there are significant timeline pressures, or when client has low appreciation of the value e-learning brings on to the table.

I thus want to do two things better – first to persuade our clients for allocating adequate resources (read – time, and access to leaders/learners) to our ID team, so that they get enough time and inputs to wave their magic wand!

Second is related to the issue of ROI on e-learning. Now, it’s not about which makes more economic sense – almost 100% of decision makers agree that after accounting for everything e-learning is far more cost effective (and that fortunately or unfortunately is the primary reason why most organizations adopt e-learning). What is controversial is effectiveness of e-learning as training medium – does it really help, is it just a tool to save money or will I be better off spending money in traditional means of training which is a safer option and will hopefully give better results as well.

It’s this dilemma which at times leads to inadequate allocation of time, energy, and budget by the client to e-learning, which eventually results in average courses and low uptake, thus hurting the learner as well as organization interests.

Therefore to better address this issue, I want to collect empirical data of not only e-learning effectiveness, but also of comparison between e-learning delivered courses vis-à-vis classroom delivered courses so as to come up with fair set of expectations from different delivery mediums. 

(Manish Gupta is Head – Business Development at G-Cube)

I think 2008 will be an exciting year that will mark some interesting changes in corporate HR strategies and social learning phenomena.

If we look at some of the recent trends – one is the evolution of Web 2.0 and its increasing fusion with the e-Learning tools that broadly include mobile learning, wiki, blogging, podcasting and synchronous tools (including white-board, chat, audio and video). Second is that earlier the delivery was static because the objective was completely different as compared to what administrators seek from the delivery platforms today. Now the learning platforms offer you endless functionalities to plan, size, deliver, track, calculate and support your decision making process.

I’ve been watching and receiving a number of e-Learning platform requisition tenders and what I could imply was: -

• No organization is barely interested in delivery of the e-Learning programs; instead they need a system that dovetails well with the overall HR infrastructure.
• An attractive feature demand change in the LMS market with increasing demands for Web 2.0 features, improved collaboration, robust reporting, and Talent Management.
• Organizations are looking for a system that offers superior functions to support organizational communication not just training!
• Robust decision support, reporting and analytics.
• Much more…

My predictions for 2008: -

Informal e-Learning: -

1. Social networks AKA networking tools: More social portals that would foster open learning and community based transfer and synthesis of knowledge, thoughts and insights. These portals may offer noteworthy functionalities like discussion board, wiki, podcasting and much more! I’m still waiting for a social networking portal to offer mobile compatibility as its very important for business executives.
2. Open document sharing portals like SlideShare and DocStoc will acquaint the user’s knowledge-gap.

Corporate e-Learning: -

1. E- Learning analytics: With heavy investments in the area – compilation, visualization and interpretation of electronic data collected in the context of e-Learning activity will become much more important. I’m hopeful to witness a promising e-Learning analytics tool that may assist the training administrators calculate the cost, ROI, and TCO over every dollar spent on training programs. This would become even more necessary if economy slows down as discussed in earlier post by Ankit.
2. Game & Simulation based Learning – My own gut feel says that overall market for serious games, and simulations would have a more than proportionate increase in demand. Organizations involved in development of such games are realizing that a mixed onsite and off-shore team can substantially bring down game development cost, and that serious games can be developed without bankrupting clients! This I believe would lead to increased adoption of serious games by clients in the coming year. 
3. Rise in Integrated purchase of Talent Management and Learning Management Systems – In the year 2007 we’ve seen some interesting shift in the LMS purchase with marked increase in demand of integrated Talent Management and Learning Management System. This would force e-Learning vendors to invest more in features and functionalities that meet the Talent Management needs of corporations.
4. Web 2.0: Many LMSs are offering “learning on demand” features that support webcasting, podcasting and video among other features, consequently many organizations may desire to redesign there corporate learning platforms.
5. Web based course authoring: As the content and interactivity standards are elevating day on day, it will require deeper Subject Matter expertise and team involvement working from various locations. Under such situation a web and workflow based authoring system would make the job more effective. We already have started witnessing some movement in this area and if I could correctly remember Udutu is a tool that offers you web authoring capabilities.

Market predictions:

1. Movement in the SME e-Learning: If you closely examine the market distribution – the total e-Learning market is divided between SME and Large corporations on a ratio of 65:35. Analysis of the real situation and my close observations predicts that e-Learning usage will gain more momentum in the SME sector, with investments mainly in infrastructure.

No matter what may happen and how far the predictions are realized – one thing that’s predestined is the exponential growth of the e-Learning Industry and thus it will remain a subject to be watched all round in the Year 2008.

(Vivek Pandey is Manager – Business Development at G-Cube)

Here are my views in response to January’s Big Question from ASTD -

One of the leading e-Learning forecasts suggests that current size of the US market alone is close to $10 billion. Market has shown consistent growth over last 5 years. Forecast also suggests reasonably good growth for next 4-5 years (the entire forecast period).

In my views growth of e-Learning is the function of two important factors. Factor Number One is the competitive cost advantage and Second Factor is the enabling qualities such as enhanced reach and learning impact.

Typically training and development has a budget which is more sensitive to profits rather than revenues, particularly in case of mature industry domains. On an average, organizations spend 5%-7% of their profits and 0.5%-1% of revenues in learning and development. However, in times of economic downturn this spending is significantly reduced. Therefore, during the economic downturn while one factor is favorable to the growth of e-Learning in relative terms the overall reduction in T&D budgets have adverse impact on new and innovative e-Learning developments. Though these innovative ideas have significant learning impact, but during downturn they don’t find their place in the L&D budgets.

I am bringing this point to discussion as this has relevance with respect to suspected US recession. If US hits moderate recession it can have impact on the direction of e-Learning trend as well.

My trend predictions therefore are in the form of questions that we have to collectively answer in near future and are presented under two scenarios:-

Scenario I – Normal US Economy

If this scenario is continued, should we see the following?

1. Who doesn’t want cost reduction?

In any case whatever is the growth in US economy, increasing expectation of capital efficiency will force organizations to continuously reduce Cost/Hour of learning delivery. For most organizations while learning impact will be the key focus, strategic cost reduction will remain the absolute intent. As a result key officer responsible for L&D will be accountable to achieve bigger and bigger learning objectives (penetration and quality) within the available budgets. As a result I guess close to 75% of the e-Learning hours may be served by rapid content.

Don’t you think in that scenario rapid e-Learning will be the desired approach to deliver what “can be” (for achieving maximize penetration) by using rapid stuff- compliance trainings, process trainings, User Guide, Instructional manual material and may be much more?

2. However more impactful trend might emerge and particularly among the organization which have matured in accepting e-Learning- Those who have realized the true benefits of what “Content-Can-Do” to a learner. e-Learning proponents by now have been able to establish that for certain learning topics (and they may be over 10-15% of the overall learning hours) more instructionally sound content enable much better quality of long-term learning even compared to class room. Call it simulation, 3-D, Level- 3, El-2.0 whatever! What do you say?

Therefore this not only substitutes class room training but achieves better results to the learners. Though this content is very expensive and have a late break-even incase calculated on numbers of learning hours. Mature organizations would still move in this direction (what do you think?) as performance benefits immediately after receipt of such training are unmatched. Such organization, today realize that talent quality has to improve rapidly to create and maintain lead in business and that is a key driver of this trend.

Scenario II – Recession in US Economy

Picture will certainly differ in-case recessionary conditions trickles in. Here are my views:-

Lower revenues and lower profits for US corporations certainly means cut in L&D spending. However, I have strong views that e-Learning in relative terms is likely to benefit from recessionary conditions as it is a proven cost friendly alternative to a traditional class room.

In my views the share of e-Learning hours will increase to over 40-50% from current 30% due to two factors – lowered base of number of training hours (as expected during recession) and increased share of e-Learning as such.

Also due to improvements in technology infrastructure coupled with lowered data access cost, share of online e-Learning should increase from current 20-25% to 35-40%.

Companies which have matured-up will likely to continue to invest on e-Learning content of all types. However the late entrants will restrict themselves to rapid content only- a potentially very large market. This will adversely impact the growth of e-Learning 2.0 and all such high operating cost and high Capex learning investment.

To sum up my thoughts e-Learning industry in general has a great future irrespective of US recession.

However innovation in the direction of high impact content will take a beating if that happens.

“Class Room” will shrink at the cost of “Rapids” and “Rapids” will have to evolve to become much more beautiful and impactful.

(Ankit Jain is Head – HR & Strategy at G-Cube)