With the constant shift, growth and evolution of technology, user behaviors and new scientifically backed learning models, the world of eLearning and L&D has gone through tremendous change in recent years. Many technological and scientific breakthroughs have had a massive impact on the evolution of the Learner Management System (LMS) as we know it. This has caused a race among software developers to build cutting edge learning delivery systems to accommodate all these evolutions. The downside is that it becomes confusing for anyone trying to decide on which LMS to choose for their organisation .
The explosion of recent developments in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain learning platforms will most definitely be the next wave of the digital learning evolution. Since it still possesses many cost, accessibility and development barriers it doesn’t seem to be going mainstream quite yet, at least in the short term.
So where are we right now with mainstream technology and learning trends? And how can you achieve a culture of learning in your organisation that is innovative, engaging, user friendly and digestible across all ages, whilst still being cost effective?
Here are 5 of the top eLearning trends to consider when defining your learning and development strategy:
The Age Of Video
As per Cisco’s VNI Forecast and Methodology, 2015-2020, video will be responsible for 80 percent of the Internet traffic around the world by 2019, with users sharing almost one million minutes of video content every second!
This places video at the heart of modern eLearning strategies since 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text (Zabisco).
Studies have also shown that viewers reported retaining 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text (insivia). Other studies have shown that “a single minute of video is worth about 1.8 million words”. (Forrester)
For these and many more reasons video will remain supremely powerful in eLearning strategies due to it’s innate ability to retain attention, tell stories and transmit information effectively in today’s mobile driven cultures.
2) Intelligent Visual Data
Data has become a key element for success in today’s fast moving business environments. The more integrated and advanced the business systems become, the bigger and more complex the data is likely to be. Having all this data without being able to easily make sense of it and extract valuable insights from it is really counterintuitive and pretty bad for business as well.
Business Intelligence has therefore become a must for organizations to keep them on track and on time in achieving their targets and allows for on the go adaptation to trends in the marketplace.
This has made learning systems that provide powerful visual data to become increasingly more important for a successful learning strategy. By utilizing the power of visual data u can ensure that u have a finger on the pulse of the organization and are more resilient to the fast changing business environment.
3) Social Learning
Even though social learning is as old as man kind it stills underpins one of the strongest and oldest human learning capacity’s, which is learning from others. In today’s global village of social networks and online culture, utilizing the power of technology to create platforms where people can share content, experiences, thoughts, discuss topics and collaborate, significantly strengthens collective intelligence and fosters a dynamic learning and teaching culture within the organization. Learning Management Systems with Social Learning and Knowledge Collaboration tools like Discussion Forums, Communities, Blog, Twitter etc. will be the stars in the coming years.
4) Micro Learning
Since studies have shown that in our fast paced over stimulated digital world, we have devolved from a 12 second average attention span in the year 2000 to an 8 second average attention span in 2015. If this is indeed true then it just makes more sense to deliver content to learners as small chunks of information rather than huge chunks of data. By providing learning in small, specific bursts of learning, it has been proven to improve the “Sticking Factor” of the learning by a factor of 10, and not only provides an easy & user-friendly structure to deliver learning content but also helps in doing it in a way that that fits well with the learners’ requirements (and attention spans).
5) Adaptive Learning
Think of adaptive learning as an artificially-intelligent tutor. Modern learning systems can now essentially learn the way people learn, and adapt learning material to each learner. As you go through a course, the learning technologies in place track which elements of the course you work well with, and which ones are more challenging, so that it can adjust the course path and course materials based on your performance. It points out what learners already know, and teaches them only what they don’t know. And since it allows students to track their own progress and develop self monitoring skills and motivation for learning, adaptive learning systems rate highly on their retention and engagement rates and will most likely play a big part of future learning systems.
And there we go. Biscuits for everyone and 5 of the top trends to implement in your learning strategy for 2018. What other trends do you think will play a big role in the future of education and eLearning?
For more information on how we can help you develop cutting edge e-learning solutions, visit our website www.yellowseed.co.za or contact us at info@yellowseed.co.za
