Why no-one is doing quality online learning.

There’s a gap in the market. Today we have two options: high quality face-to-face training and low quality e-learning. What’s missing is high quality online learning.

By ‘high quality’ I mean only that face-to-face is generally considered to be a good experience – and e-learning a poor experience. If you don’t believe me, try running ‘e-learning’ through sentiment140 (or twitterfall). Find out what people actually think of e-learning. It’s sobering (warning: swearwords won't be filtered).

And yet online learning has taken off – in fact for most adults in the Western world it is probably true that most of their learning is now done online. Just not e-learning. They still hate e-learning. So where did we go wrong?

We got off on the wrong foot. The dual premiss of e-learning was cost-reduction and knowledge transfer: so the e-learning format ended up as little more than powerpoint with a SCORM wrapper. The problem has worsened over a decade or so, because our users have seen a widening divide between their own, preferred technology, and the stuff their businesses would like them to use.

Again – why? Because norms for e-learning costs have been established at a very low level (i.e. based on the ‘pimp-my-slide’ model) and because e-learning companies have resourced themselves accordingly, it is near-impossible for them to produce apps, digital media (such as video, infographics, imagery, interactives) to anything approaching the standard that their audience will readily find elsewhere on the web. E-learning apps exist – but ask yourself how they compare to the other apps on your mobile device (‘Now your slides are an app! Yay!’). Where companies do offer ‘high end’ e-learning, it turns out to be poor by comparison even to free apps & media. Take a look at Duolingo on the app store as an example of the latter.

So this is the central industry challenge/trend for the next few years: whether e-learning companies will shift or whether the market will be absorbed by the combination of digital media companies & ambient media available for free (leaving only the compliance market). As learning professionals we will need to both raise our game and reset the expectations of our businesses if we want to be seen as worthwhile. 

Of course there are times when quality doesn’t matter, specifically when what you’re offering is really, really helpful - the kind of things you might Google or YouTube today. But that’s a different set of challenges entirely (see The tragedy of L&D for more on this).