At the HKKMS event on the 16th November David O’Dwyer and Iain Doherty presented and lead a stimulating discussion on the eLearning space in academia and in corporates.

Iain kicked off with a thought provoking discussion about the current lack of genuine success with eLearning implementations within academic institutions.  The typical approach is to utilise Learning Management Systems as a document and reference repository and the full potential of the technologies are not yet fully exploited.  Professors and lecturers in higher education are judged on their research output rather than their innovations in teaching, so moving teaching staff away from a “content delivery” approach to learning to “Connectivism”, especially with the modern connected/social web world, remains a challenge.   The discussions also touched on what would success look like and how to measure whether you have been successful.

A recorded webinar of Iain’s talk can be found on SlideShare.  Click on the following link to access

http://www.slideshare.net/eric_yh_tsui/hkkms-elearning-seminar

David (Dod) spoke of his experiences working with eLearning within corporate environments.  Companies have spent significant $$$ on supported technologies such as LMS’, virtual classroom systems, examinations systems and they go to considerable effort to integrate these to other enterprise tools such as ERP, Performance management etc, much energy and time is also put into the development of engaging interactive online content, aimed, primarily to meet compliance, and regulatory training needs.  Significant benefits are been realised on a cost saving or from a cost avoidance perspective, however the original vision of eLearning and a single learning portal and the learning organisation have not been realised.  The plethora of new tools and new approaches for communications and collaboration has meant that staff are looking first at their team sites or their corporate intranets for the information that they need and not to their Learning Management Systems or Corporate ‘Learning portals’.  Companies are successfully experimenting with social media tools and collaborative team spaces and the challenge is how current eLearning offerings can add value to this reality.   Essentially corporate wide content strategies are lagging behind the business needs and also IT departments are not able to react in time, resulting in different groups moving on and doing their own thing, this is leading to increased fragmentation and an exacerbation of the issues.   Challenges indeed.

David’s PPT can be found HERE

Solutions?  Watch this space.