The Future of E-learning

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Libby Cross, Senior Marketing Executive

Since Learning Pool was founded, the team has worked really hard to forecast where the technology landscape is moving to and move our services where they need to be to keep adding value for our customers.

In an open source subscription world our customers have the flexibility to choose their providers and that forces us to keep innovating for the future of e-learning – the output of that so far in our history is that we renew 99% of our customers each year, our business keeps growing and we been a part of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 for the last 3 years.

• We were the first provider of open source LMS solutions to councils in the UK reducing their costs by more than 90%
• We enabled customers to effectively ‘open source’ learning content if they chose to do so by sharing it with the rest of the Learning Pool community
• We cracked the problem of integrating classroom learning and e-learning on a Moodle based platform
• We were the first company to implement learning as a service with no set up fees or hidden charges

We think the future of e-learning is about:

The cloud

Advances in cloud technology are changing every aspect of the internet. We think in 5 years ‘on premises’ solutions will be relics of the past;

Responsive web technologies

So content is built once and is smart enough to work across many devices;

Gamified Learning

The reluctance to adopt this technology in corporate markets has been driven, rightly, by cost and technical challenges. The gamers in the Learning Pool team (of which there are lots!) are tracking the market for games development engines and we’re piloting some technology in this space. We’ve previously completed a virtual bus tour game for a client and we expect to be coming back to that technology within the next 18 months;

Collaboration

Collabortion between organisations seemed like a crazy concept 3 years ago but now it feels more comfortable. We think L&D is an area where collaboration can be adopted quickly and with a high impact, especially since competitive pressures are more manageable than in other areas of business;

Accreditation

Accreditation of learning so that people get real value from work based learning – this has been an inclusive win for e-learning projects in the past but initiatives like Open Badges change all that.

Interoperability

Interoperability of learning so that people can take their learning with them in an e-portfolio of some description. Again we’re watching the Mozilla project (Open Badges) closely in this regard and are talking to a number of organisations including the awarding body City & Guilds about piloting some learning in this space;