Updating e-learning

In my 2009 book, Delivering E-Learning, I made a number of forecasts, and as I wrote those three years ago, it seems timely to review them.

Arguably, the most glaring omission of the book is its complete lack of reference to Twitter, or micro-blogging. Given the relatively recent explosion of this phenomenon, I beg leave to be excused. I did say that social networking was “just the beginning, and people will find more new ways to interact with a much wider community of contacts, using digital technology”, so I spotted the trend, just not the way it would manifest. As an aside, this may sound a cautionary note to those rushing to buy shares in Facebook – have you seen the bell curves (growth then decline) of Friends Reunited, MySpace and Bebo? Why should Facebook be any different?

Back to my crystal ball. Essentially I made four predictions:

Virtual reality. I think I got that one wrong. I’m not aware of significant new developments in this sphere is the past thee years, and if anything I think its prospects have receded. I’m not clear why that should be, and I’d be interested in others’ opinions – the potential remains massive.

Mobile learning. While deploring the term “M-learning”, I argued that “mobile learning must surely grow in scale of use and in complexity”. I see that as a tick in the box, as more and more of us are using smartphones and tablets for learning.

New interfaces. This has not moved as fast as I hoped, but the huge take-up of touch screens and voice recognition is a clear sign that we are on the way. I stand by my claim that “more intuitive user interfaces are surely just around the corner”.

Personal learning environments have not grown as I predicted, but we can certainly hear the death-knell of proprietary online learning environments, with a flight to open source versions or (more significantly) away from dedicated learning software to more generic, and more flexible technologies, which are easier to embed in organisations’ systems and which employees adopt more readily.

Overall, about 50-50, which I’d argue is not a bad average for predicting. And I don’t think I missed any significant new trend other than Twitter.

Any views?

Case study, part two

In 1998, it looked as if Pearson had established a launch pad for a new management education business that could compete with, even outstrip, the university business schools. Within five years, that management education business no longer existed. What went wrong?

First, brand value was destroyed. Within two years, all of the acquired brands were dropped, and although their replacement, Financial Times Management, was strong, there was no coherent strategy for transferring customer loyalties from the old brands to the new.

Second, perhaps as a consequence of the rebranding, incomes fell, as the whole proved to be smaller than the sum of its parts. The various niche selling propositions were lost in a grand vision that lacked detail.

Then things started to spiral out of control. Inspired by new market developments in knowledge management and e-learning, and supported by a multi-million pound investment from Pearson, Financial Times Management reinvented itself again, announcing at the end of 1999 that it was rebranding as FT Knowledge, its second major name change in two years, and for most of its existing customers, the third name they’d known their supplier by in less than three years.

Pearson had made a big acquisition of Simon and Schuster, and shoehorned one of its subsidiaries, the New York Institute of Finance, into FT Knowledge. Then came the leveraged acquisition of the much bigger Forum Corporation. Like a car that replaces all its body parts and its engine, it was hard to tell whether this was still the same entity.

It was a confusing time for big publishers. The dot com bubble burst, nobody could explain their e-learning strategy, or why they had spent so much on it to no obvious gain. Ten years after Pitman first embarked on its expansion plan, the company, and most of the value in it no longer existed*, and nobody quite understood why. Pearson, like McGraw-Hill, News International and others, withdrew from e-learning, licking its wounds.


* The original book publishing business continues to thrive within Pearson, mainly under the Prentice Hall imprint.

Case study, part one

In the 1990s, Pitman Publishing Limited, wholly owned by Pearson plc, was the biggest business book publisher in the UK – by far. Its nearest rival, Kogan Page, was about one third of its size. Pitman wanted to grow, but felt it had exhausted the possibilities for organic growth, and so it turned to acquisitions.

Pitman re-examined what sort of business it was in, and made a decisive shift in thinking, from book publishing to management education. It was already involved in publishing of periodicals and learning resources, contract publishing and electronic publishing, but the new thinking opened up new acquisition targets.

Pitman looked within the Pearson empire first, and acquired Training Direct, formerly Longman Training, which had already swallowed up Rank Training and others. This added capability in management training videos, in DVD format. Then it looked for a management training provider.

Its first management training acquisition was HDL, formerly Henley Distance Learning, which had recently acquired Taytech. However, Pitman rapidly felt it had made the wrong acquisition, as everywhere it turned it found HDL out-manoeuvred, and beaten to prestigious blue chip contracts, by an unlikely competitor. This was The Open College, which despite its name (the legacy of start-up public funding) specialised in management development programmes for corporate clients.

When Pitman acquired The Open College in 1997, it felt it had completed its moves, and set about restructuring the new company, by now double the size Pitman had started with. In 1998 the new business was rebranded, drawing upon one of the most formidable names held by Pearson, the Financial Times. The new company, which dominated the UK market for management education, outside university business schools, was called Financial Times Management.

I had been Manager for Scotland of The Open College, and now held the equivalent position in Financial Times Management, with twice the staff and resources, and double the customer and income base. I was proud to be part of the new company, and excited by its prospects.

(part two to follow)

The Immortal Memory

Robert Burns (1759-1796) was one of the most learned low-born Scots of his day, and naturally a champion of the benefits of learning. One of his better known quotes,

Gi’e me a spark o’ Nature’s fire,
That’s a’ the learning I desire

bears testament more to his love of nature than any downgrading of learning.

I could further claim Burns as a champion of evaluation. He was, after all, an exciseman, and working for customs and excise would have sharpened his sense of measurement and learning as, again, better known quotes bear testament:

What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted

and

The best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley.

All of which demonstrates that Scotland’s best-loved son may be cited in almost any cause – and frequently is.

This is the 253rd anniversary of his birth, and tonight I attend the Anniversary Dinner of the Hamilton Burns Club, one of the oldest Burns clubs in the world, dating back to the 19th century and tracing annual dinners back continuously to 1877 (apart from during the two world wars). My good friend David Ogg, as this year’s club president, delivers the Immortal Memory tonight, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, and I wish him well.

More on Burns at http://www.robertburns.org/ and the audio archive at http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/.

Digital evaluation

I once attempted a joke about e-learning, following Don Morrison’s suggestion that a measure of an industry, profession or sector’s maturity is the emergence of jokes about it.

In that spirit, the prospects for learning evaluation are discouraging. This is a field that dates back at least 60 years, and the only humorous observation I’ve heard is more a witticism than a joke, that the return on investment (ROI) of ROI isn’t worth calculating.

...yes, I didn’t think it was very funny either.

The thing is, it’s not even true. The advent of digital technology has made learning evaluation more affordable, efficient and effective.

I observed in my book Delivering E-Learning that applications of digital technology to learning have concentred on learning delivery, and not much on the other phases of the classic learning cycle (needs analysis, planning and evaluation). While this remains so, there are increasing attempts to make better use of technology for evaluation. In a few weeks (1 March 2012), Airthrey will publish a paper on this topic, highlighting the use of technology for evaluation planning, data collection, storage and analysis, and reporting.

More to follow, and meantime, contributions to the debate welcome.

learnforever

I’ve been making some changes to the learnforever sites.

www.learnforever.co.uk has a new article added, and now includes a books page, featuring my books and links to buy them on amazon.co.uk. I’m also considering adding advertising to that site, but before I do, I’d appreciate any feedback on the changes to this blog.

I’ve added the Amazon Associate links to my books to this blog, but more significantly, I’ve also added Google Adsense advertising, which should be showing to the right of this blog post and directly underneath it. I guess purists may feel it detracts from the aesthetic of the site, but that apart, I’d be interested in any comments on whether it adversely affects your reading of the blog.

My writing work is essentially a sideline to my professional activities, so monetising these sites, as long as that’s relatively unobtrusive, is a way of ensuring I can maintain them. I’d welcome any further suggestions on other ways to monetise.

What do you think?

Strategy

My direct experience of developing and implementing business strategy has been rather limited. In the past ten years I have set up and run four companies, three of which are still in business (the eLearning Alliance, eXcellence in eLearning and Airthrey), but these were/are very small – at their peak, none reached a turnover of £½ million or as many as ten employees.

Perhaps more significant was my involvement at senior management level in the Scottish Foundation, where I was Director of Training, and the Open College (UK) Ltd, where I was part of the senior management team. In both these roles I influenced and carried out business strategy, but these experiences are now at least one to two decades old.

My interest in strategy has been sparked mainly by the connections between learning strategy and business strategy. My specialist subjects in the final year of my MBA were Marketing Strategy and HR Strategy. And the original title of my second book, eventually published as Delivering E-Learning (see sidebar), was E-learning Strategy.

This led me to the work of John Kay, whom I cannot recommend highly enough, and most recently to the fascinating Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. I love the way Richard Rumelt debunks the linguistic conceit that equates “strategy” with “important” (a similar misuse is “executive”). Following Rumelt’s advice, my latest strategy priority is to pinpoint obstacles to business growth, and work out how to overcome them. Further advice welcome!