The evolving technological age demanded a shift from the existing Learning Management Systems (LMS) in the marketplace, towards the concept of Learning-on-the-go. With ever-expanding businesses spreading the workforce across the globe and the need to scale up the employee’s skills, many industries realized the need to move from a traditional LMS towards more experiential and immersive learning systems “Learning Experience Platforms (LXP)”. The immersive nature of content delivery and the impact of the content on the learners have been the two prominent aspects that have driven the shift.
The latest trends in the E-learning industry focus on improving the collaborative learning experience of the users by including innovative features like virtual and augmented reality-based learning, interactive videos, AI along with the Integration of Video Conferencing Tools. Such trends eventually promote user adoption, user engagement, information absorption, knowledge retention, and skills transfer
As Companies become more data-driven, using a learning platform will not be limited just to identify the right pieces of training for upskilling the employees, but will also utilize data analytics to measure their performance and define personalized learning paths for employees. Companies that follow this trend, will be more organized and in a better position to handle the rapidly changing digital landscape in the workplace.
Let us look at a few technologies that are driving the E-learning journey across industries:
VR, MR & AR for Immersive Training Experience:
Technologies like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) will soon be trending in the eLearning space. Some organizations have already started using these reality technologies to deliver immersive training. As employees start preferring immersive experiences in pieces of training, the adoption rate will be much faster in the future. Such reality technologies embedded in LMS help instructors deliver a unique learning experience to learners, leading to improved knowledge retention
Experiential learning through MR is also an essential element for the overall immersive experience in today’s content offering. It involves a much deeper level of engagement that is immersive, real-time, and interactive. Such an experience is regarded as highly valuable particularly in education involving Medical sciences, Manufacturing, Aviation, and other high-risk environments.
Big Data Analytics: Getting bigger by the day
Big data analytics has provided a new meaning to personalized learning, where it has become a powerful tool that is used to cater to the learners’ evolving needs. Moreover, LMS, with a strong data analytics engine, helps gather insightful information about learners' experiences. The comprehensive dashboards provide a great to visualize this information, thus, deriving useful meaning out of it.
With Big Data analytical tools, it's easier to gather and interpret data about a learner's performance on a specific course and use it further to deliver more personalized training in the future. It also equips instructors with insights into whether their delivered pieces of training are proving to be effective or not, and if the learners are satisfied in terms of the Return on investment they have made. Instructors can determine what learners are missing, which guides them to make learning worthwhile for their learners. The analysis helps transform training concepts and provides a useful learning path.
Companies that make use of such comprehensive platforms are able to provide more focused personalized training and create required cohorts, which ultimately affects how corporate training is designed, delivered, and tracked.
Portable Training Formats:
Training content is an integral part of the whole LMS ecosystem. In order to lower the cost, businesses have devised portable forms that have led towards the creation of new industry segments. The journey from Learning Management System to a Learning experience system is now on two wheels where one is of content/training providers and the other is the experience platform providers. Some formats are often expected to come pre-integrated with any learning platforms:
- Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)
- xAPI/Tin Can
- Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)
Out of these, the LTI is gaining traction as an Extended Enterprise Standard. LTI is similar to SCORM, but it doesn’t require content to reside on the same server as an LMS. This provides B2B content sellers the opportunity to maintain content in a central location and serve it on-demand to any LTI-compliant LMS upon request.
For training content providers, this approach is logistically far superior to sending a file to customers who must load it on their LMS and then update it on an ongoing basis. SCORM offers a workaround to this file-sharing problem through cross-domain “stub” files. However, LTI is a much cleaner solution.
Open Source: Gaining Ground
Open sources like Moodle, Totara & Open eDX are becoming more acceptable across industries. The perception is rapidly changing and making a serious dent in the corporate extended enterprise marketplace.
Over the last few years, open source has been associated with strength in the academic LMS space. These systems are robust, highly flexible and generally provide high-end capabilities for a lower total cost of ownership than many commercial systems. Moreover, they are reconfigurable and are supported by partners who offer specialized expertise in every imaginable market niche.
Open sources are particularly attractive for extended enterprise scenarios because licensing fees are usually non-existent. A training business can scale rapidly without incurring any incremental licensing costs. This means that more of the budget can be invested in content.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Steadily making an impact on eLearning, AI is expected to continue improving the online training experience. One of the benefits of AI is that it can serve as a virtual mentor for learners to provide answers to their questions at any time and on any device.
Having said that, pigeonholing AI as a tool that merely suggests the content is a shallow interpretation of the technology’s potential. With insights based on user data, learning behavior, and preferences (not simply what others have liked), AI makes learning more personal and relevant. It changes enterprise learning’s status-quo with an incredible ability to deliver automated and truly personalized learning at scale to completely change the way people learn and that too for the better.
It’s an automated version of what a great teacher does, which is, to evaluate the competency level of each individual and give them relevant content based on that. It’s a matter of time when learning will be powered by sets of specialized algorithms, each responsible for a different task such as analyzing/reading content, extracting video “pills” and re-aggregating them into courses based on various learning preferences and styles. This will exponentially improve the personalization of learning.
AI’s ability to aggregate and curate internally and externally produced content, while relieving L&D admins from menial tasks, brings real smarts to enterprise learning in a way that transforms it from a commodity to any organization’s competitive advantage.
Video Content: Running ahead in the Marathon
Many portals provide learning content in a video format. At the same time, there are a plethora of ways to develop video-based digital content. But it is vital to use a relevant content and media strategy to engage and provide output-driven video training with an immersive experience. Integration of widely popular Video Conferencing tools & Mixed Reality-based immersive content will be driving the market as such solutions have the ability to provide an experience similar to a physical classroom.
Cloud as a disruptor in the LMS ecosystem:
Cloud LMS Solutions will be ahead and may as well win the extended enterprise race. Such cloud-hosted solutions are stealing the thunder from bigger talent-suite LMS vendors in getting traction from strong contenders like pure-play extended enterprise solutions and big Industries.
We are seeing an increasing interest in cloud LMS platforms that are flexible enough to support any type of enterprise-class solution – internal, external, or a combination of audiences. These platforms offer modern, turn-key solutions that are highly engaging, affordable, and scalable. So, when LMS buyers compare these solutions with talent-suite platforms, the choice is easy.
