Analysis
What are the main innovations applied to training technologies in 2016?

David Patterson (Learning Light & The Company of Thought), Bryan Eldridge and Fabrizio Giorgini (eXact learning solutions) analyze the main innovations applied to training technologies in 2016.

 

 

David Patterson, director of the UK-based consultancy and market analysts, Learning Light, and a Founding Principal of the international corporate e-learning think tank, The Company of Thought: In today’s always online, mobile, social world, the nature of how organizations sell is changing. Selling is becoming social. Engagements can be totally online. Sales relationships are no longer cultivated but quickly created and equally quickly cancelled.

 

This is giving rise to the emergence of elegant, light-touch platforms designed to curate and distribute learning materials quickly. With a learner centric focus, these platforms increasingly bypass the constricts of SCORM and they pay no attention to xAPI either.

 

The platforms are mobile-oriented and designed for learners who are used to Google solving their problems on the move via short chunks of learning from disparate sources such as YouTube and Vimeo.

 

This ability to curate and publish disparate learning materials is not new. Many LMSs have been doing this for some time. What differentiates these new Learning Curation Platforms is their simplicity of use and elegance of delivery.

 

Courses can be curated, customized and deployed in a matter of minutes to respond to rapid organizational needs, pulling together existing materials and quickly contextualising them. Managers, team leaders and individual team members can now quickly and easily capture and create learning opportunities and share them with colleagues in an easy way using these simple platforms to deliver what the now sadly missed Jay Cross termed the Learnscape.

 

This will help to move learning into the specialist area of marketing and creative agencies. Their products will be aimed at corporate sales and marketing departments. This could bypass the traditional learning and development department and address organizational learning patterns that are increasingly dictated by learners being truly mobile and social learners.

 

Bryan Eldridge (Senior Business Consultant, eXact learning solutions) and Fabrizio Giorgini (R&D Manager, eXact learning solutions): The major technological innovations for training technologies in 2016 are converging toward the growing use of wearable computers and other post-pc technologies in the delivery of learning experiences.

 

Typical consumer wearable computing devices include fitness bands, smart watches, and smart glasses that deliver information via visual overlays of the “real” world.

 

Fitness bands, such as Fitbit, already provide the ability to create competitions between user-defined communities, post leaderboards, provide encouragement, award digital badges for individual and group competition achievements, and share tips – all key elements of a gamification strategy.

 

Smart watches, including the Apple Watch, Android Wear, and the more geek and budget-friendly Pebble Watch, allow learners and learning administrators alike more flexibility and overall mobility than ever before. Via standard apps or open SDKs (software development kits) learners can receive and respond to requests/questions/information from learning platforms and/or directly from the content itself in a manner never before possible. Learning content can also utilize data from the wearable’s sensors to deliver localized or otherwise contextualized versions of the content itself.

 

Another quickly growing and evolving field of wearable technology are smart glasses such as the Sony’s SmartEyeGlass and Microsoft’s HoloLens provide a very clear path to OTJ (on the job training) and performance support via the delivery of visual overlays such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and holographic displays – all controllable via hand gestures, voice commands, and other modality-specific control options.

 

The term “Post-PC technology” typically encompasses the sector of mobile phone and tablet-based technology. With the recent introduction of Apple’s iPad Pro and Google’s somewhat comparable Pixel C Tablet into the tablet-PC hybrid market being pioneered by Microsoft’s own Surface line of offerings, the learning world has the largest selection of potential delivery modalities since the beginning of the field. With the mobility and sensors included in most of the devices in this category, learners can interact with their environments and each other that traditional PC-based offerings could not begin to offer.