At times when most of us are busy sharing tips and discovering and sharing potentially new methods on making eLearning engaging and effective, we decided to take a break and retrospect as on why all the recent advances in eLearning come to being.
If we look at it closely, eLearning hasn’t really evolved on its own. It has always been in response/reaction to the learning requirements, the corporate training methods and changing demands of L&D function. So, how has corporate training changed over the years? The evolution has been in different stages and eLearning solutions have come into place to make corporate training easier and more convenient to the changing corporate environment.
Stage 1- From Classroom Training to eLearning
Corporate training was once entirely face-to-face, classroom-based training. This consumed a great amount of time - scheduling, adjusting the work and delivery time to accommodate training, then getting the employees to attend, evaluation, etc. To add to this some employees had to travel constantly managing the logistics was always a barrier. eLearning was gaining prevalence with the availability of desktops, laptops and was soon adopted for corporate training, owing to the ease it provided. With the advent of laptops, eLearning could now be carried around and accessed at the required time too.
Stage 2- eLearning and the Device Boom
Then came an era where telecom revolution changed the whole game and technologies started evolving at an alarming rate, devices-its sizes, operating systems, makes etc. had multiple permutations and combinations. Corporates opened their floodgates and allowed the devices to storm in. Policies (BYOD)were being modified to allow device usage. This shift forced the way training was delivered and eLearning had to evolve too. It became Mobile learning then responsive, adaptive and multi-device. At times, it also had to have off-line functionalities. This we consider was the big paradigm shift in the way learning or training was delivered.
Stage 3- Millennials at Work
With time the generation changed and the increase of millennials in workplace certainly forced L7D function to relook at its eLearning strategies and this changed a lot of things. The Digital Natives watch and learn differently. The new fishes in town, as we termed them needed corporate training to be innovative, interesting and engaging. Videos become more popular in eLearning and so did interactives, scenarios and games.
The overall focus turned towards capturing the attention of the learners and getting them hooked to eLearning.
Stage 4- Informal Learning, Micro eLearning and Beyond…
With the change in learner attitudes and the change in the way corporates viewed learning, the whole corporate training has become more of an open space discussion. Informal learning as it is popularly known becomes a new buzz and started emphasizing on interactions and discussions amongst peers, social and collaborative learning that makes used of social media tools to build and share knowledge- opening up great many possibilities.
The shorter attention spans, lack of time and increased requirement for just-in-time support have led to chunking of knowledge, and creation of micro eLearning.
Personalized learning too is an often talked about term in corporate training sector.
eLearning is constantly being updated and transformed to meet the corporate requirement for decades. This process will continue as long as there are possibilities to be explored and requirements to be met.
In the recent years, VR, Augmented Reality etc. have been in buzz. Though still at the advent those technologies can take corporate training to an entirely new level.
We at Knowzies keep a close watch on all the trends in eLearning and corporate training. Knowzies is one those innovative organizations which has kept pace with changing cycles of training, Learning & Development needs and we promise to do so in future as well. So, keep reading this space for the latest trends and updates. In case if you have any interesting stories to share with us, you can write to us at info@www.knowzies.com