Top ten bad behaviours

E-learning vendors cause a lot of problems in the market – here are just ten of their most common faults.

1. Vendors’ definitions of e-learning are often misleading because they are devised to lend disproportionate importance to their own offers.

2. Vendors rarely know much about learning, yet profess to be experts in e-learning – they’re not.

3. Vendors’ simplistic understanding of learning leads to technology of limited value, missed opportunities, and poor e-learning implementations.

4. Vendors often claim to offer complete e-learning solutions, when in fact their core competence lies in just one part.

5. Vendors use technological jargon to mystify e-learning, when they should be trying to make it more accessible. “E-learning 2.0” is a term used by vendors to cover up their past failures, while offering the same products as before.

6. The benefits vendors claim for e-learning serve more to make the vendor’s business case than to identify real benefits for their clients (e.g., ‘scalability’ helps vendors target larger clients, but is meaningless for small-to-medium-sized clients).

7. Vendors typically just sell their products, rather than helping identify clients’ problems and finding solutions for them.

8. Vendors tend to have a better understanding of technology issues but don’t share it in an open and honest way.

9. Vendors over-emphasise the importance of e-learning technology standards.

10. Vendors sometimes offer misleading price information, excluding items such as updates or expenses, which can be a high proportion of the client’s real costs.