
Investment in workplace development and learning is set to upsurge yet again this year, with the growth of the global eLearning industry expected to rise to 11% this year. But with employees changing roles around 14 times throughout their career and skills having a lifespan of just five years, where is the investment and training departments likely to go?
There is no longer such a thing as a lifetime job- only a life of jobs. Adding that to the average shelf-life of skills now being way less than six years, it no longer makes sense for training departments to concentrate their attention on isolated, role-based skills.
With people moving roles more rapidly and frequently, and the rapid technological advancements altering not only what we do but how we do it, we’d think employees might hold their hands up and freeze on developing anything.
Based on diligent data analysis and market research, we’re giving you a sneak peek into eLearning’s future.
User-Generated Content
A foreseeable trend that arises this year is User-generated content where learners develop and share content with their peers. This may include blog posts, videos, pictures, testimonials, tweets, eBooks and any type of content. From an entrepreneur perspective, using content generated by their students could decrease both the money budget and time.
Definitely, user-generated content campaigns have been a relentless player also in the marketing environment as people crave real stories from real people, and they want interaction with other humans. With that in mind, it’s not a coincidence that 92% of people are more likely to share and trust recommendations from another person rather than from branded content.
What makes user-generated content so effective? User-generated content isn’t just cost-effective, but it’s also very authentic and creates a sense of community among employees. Such a tactic is effortlessly done within any type of enterprise as it facilitates knowledge sharing and benefits curious minds.
Smart Content Curation
Another learning trend predicted to dominate in 2020 is Smart Content Curation. This fresh eLearning solution refers to the manner we view and treat our educational resources, given today’s generation don’t have time or enough patience to discern the necessary information in them.
According to the eLearning Industry’s Network, the largest online community of experts involved in the eLearning field, a smart content curation implies top-notch organization, optimization and omission.
What does that mean? Every time we develop new learning content, we have to think:
- Is our information well-structured, suitable and targeted enough for our target audience?
- Which platforms can we rely on for new, relevant information?
- How will we share the targeted takeaways our learners need?
- How can we prove that we own the learning material?
- How will we curate the course structure?
To attain optimal content delivery, instructors must adopt a plan to develop a course. Here we are talking about instructional design – the continuous development of instructional material relying on instructional theory.
Here’s an example – Poppy Hill, eLearning expert and a talented founder of Polygon, emphasizes storytelling as an approach to make your content engaging. Given that we are evolutionarily hardwired for stories, eLearning and storytelling are a natural pair.
Effective mobile learning -not just mobile content
Mobile learning is expected to improve and even gain more traction. Increasingly more businesses are producing mobile learning, with approachable authoring tools, as it’s super easy to create one piece of content that works across all mobile devices. Still, despite 67% of people saying that they rely on mobile devices for learning, statistics for using “in-house eLearning” is way below that figure.
What barriers might face users? Content being published on platforms that aren’t even close mobile-friendly? Content that hasn’t been actually designed for the small screens of our mobile devices? Or content that hasn’t exactly been developed for “on the fly” type of learning?
Given that receptive authoring technologies are more entrenched in the industry, we expect the rise of real mobile learning design.
Interactive Video
Video still remains an imperative aspect of eLearning. And it will continue to be among the forthcoming trends. Videos have been scientifically confirmed to boost learner participation and engagement, thus increasing the ability to envisage the “unexplained” and knowledge retention.
Video-sharing platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube, and the burst of mobile devices, have produced the new renaissance in video use.
Today, videos have quickly become the ideal medium to deliver training. To put it differently, a well-crafted video can be extremely engaging and can be shared relatively quickly.
The interactivity we witness in videos can be considered a main influencing factor of the eLearning success as it can easily transform passive watchers into active learners.
Numerous platforms today provide interactive videos. In fact, they become increasingly successful as they give a lot of guidance and how you can spice up your courses with interactive videos via a variety of free courses and free blog posts.
But what are interactive videos anyway? Interactive videos allow students and employees as well to explore further resources from the video content with interactive objects appearing in the video and links. They help users to effortlessly navigate through the content bookmarking, tables, navigational buttons and interactive transcripts.
AI, AR, VR, MR and VUIs
Today we also see some improvements in the user experience field. AI. AR, VR, MR and VUIs are expected to stir attention and advance the learning experience.
VUIs or voice user interfaces allow students to use a system with speech or voice command. Already accessible on mobile devices, VUIs allow us to give commands to computers, eyes and hands-free users can effortlessly interact with a product.
Being able to verbalize almost any type of Google search instead of trying each sentence makes information easily reachable and universal. This, in turn, might encourage students to look for facts, check spelling and even look up words without interrupting the main task.
With some of the trends we highlight in this article, signs are clear that the eLearning industry will only grow stronger in the coming year. The more technology advances, the more engaging, accessible and personalized these trends will turn out to be.