As you may recall, I posted on eLS when the suite was released, and while welcoming this addition the e-learning practitioners’ content development toolkit, I tempered my enthusiasm as follows:

Where I think Adobe missed a trick is that they should have released this package at least five years ago. While we can say that in the early 2000’s, the e-learning industry wasn’t as large a market segment as it is today, it was substantial enough. Certainly enough of a market segment to be a valuable revenue-generating stream for the company. Unlike DTP, graphical design, and video post-production (which were digitized evolutions of existing industries) e-learning was a whole new industry, a real-life child of the World Wide Web.

I’ll give with one hand and take away with the other: well done Adobe, great to see you’ve finally committed to e-learning; equally, an e-learning suite of tools is such an obvious addition to your product range that you should have done this years ago.

The suite consists of the following apps:

	Tool	Adobe’s Description
	Adobe Captivate® 4	Create and deliver rich interactive content
	Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 with CourseBuilder Extension	Design, develop, and maintain standards-based websites and applications
	Adobe Flash® CS4 Professional with Learning Interactions	Create and deliver rich interactive content
	Adobe Photoshop® CS4 Extended	Discover new dimensions in digital imaging
	Adobe Presenter 7	Rapidly create high-impact Adobe Flash presentations and eLearning courses from PowerPoint
	Adobe Soundbooth® CS4	Create and edit audio with ease
	Adobe Acrobat® 9 Pro	Protect documents and accelerate information exchange with PDF

Very full-featured indeed: if I was starting work today as a learning and development professional and I was handed this set of applications as my courseware production platform, I would be very happy with it.

But don’t just take my word for it: here’s (a very highly abridged version of) what Donald Clark has to say:

It is a complete and tightly integrated solution for authoring rich learning content. …All-in-all the Adobe eLearning suite is a great product for designers, being that it is the first elearning suite.

His review describes the applications and functionality of the Suite in very good detail, and Donald uses his own experience of using the platform to throw further light on how the applications integrate to enable e-learning designers (“instructional designers, developers, and other learning specialists”) to create high-quality courseware.

Donald concludes his article by discussing what he’d like to see in version next of the Suite and his overall impression of the package. Click here to read the review in full.

Note: Adobe have published and are maintaining a useful blog for Captivate users. Click here for more.

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Finally, Adobe have recognized that like graphics, DTP, and digital / video media production, e-learning is a significant market vertical for their applications, and have released the Adobe eLearning Suite (eLS). According to their website, eLearning Suite

…software integrates best-of-breed tools for rapid eLearning, courseware authoring, simulations, and media editing. Create rich, interactive learning experiences that engage audiences with video,  audio, and powerful visuals. Work productively with rapid authoring tools that deliver smart collaboration features as well as tight integration with asset-creation tools. And deliver content to the web, the desktop, mobile devices, and Learning Management Systems.

The suite consists of the following apps:

	Tool	Adobe’s Description
	Adobe Captivate® 4	Create and deliver rich interactive content
	Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 with CourseBuilder Extension	Design, develop, and maintain standards-based websites and applications
	Adobe Flash® CS4 Professional with Learning Interactions	Create and deliver rich interactive content
	Adobe Photoshop® CS4 Extended	Discover new dimensions in digital imaging
	Adobe Presenter 7	Rapidly create high-impact Adobe Flash presentations and eLearning courses from PowerPoint
	Adobe Soundbooth® CS4	Create and edit audio with ease
	Adobe Acrobat® 9 Pro	Protect documents and accelerate information exchange with PDF

Quite impressive – if I was starting work today and I was handed this set of applications as my content development toolkit, I would be very happy indeed. Similarly, as you can see from Figure 1 (below) the Suite’s workflow plays to the strengths of the individual applications. I would assert that this workflow is industry-standard practice, as already implemented by most e-learning developers worth their fee, so no surprises there.  

Figure 1. eLS workflow

However, where I think Adobe missed a trick is that they should have released this (or a similar) package at least five years ago. While we can say that in the early 2000’s , the e-learning industry wasn’t as large a market segment as it is today, it was substantial enough. Certainly enough of a market segment to be a valuable revenue generating stream for the company. Unlike DTP, graphical design, and video post-production (which were digitized evolutions of existing industries) e-learning was a whole new industry, a real-life child of the World Wide Web. 

Think of the opportunity they had to build a loyal and growing customer- and user base if they had released this suite in 2002, and you’ll realize what they let slip through their corporate fingers. As stands, learning professionals in the past had to build their own toolkits: at this stage I’m not going to change from SoundForge  to Soundbooth, for example, or from DocBookXML and XXE to Acrobat Pro – but I will of course keep using Captivate, Flash and Dreamweaver.

So I’ll give with one hand and take away with the other: well done Adobe, great to see you’ve finally committed to e-learning; equally, an e-learning suite of tools is such an obvious addition to your product range that you should have done this years ago.

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Intrigued? Now read on…

Back in February this year, I wrote the first of my occasional series on Recession and the challenge to e-learning; in that first piece, I concluded by suggesting that

in the era of $100 a barrel oil and the value of virtual classrooms; the ROI of e-learning as opposed to traditional methods; even the impact of traditional ways of teaching on the environment (”e-learning” becomes “eco-learning” anyone?).

Based on an announcement made last Thursday 10th September 2008, I can now assert that we are beginning to see that there is validity in this conclusion. Based on the level of investment one e-learning enterprise has committed to developing the industry in the medium- to long term, the market in now in a place to support the proposition that the ROI on e-learning makes sense, and generates profit.

E-learning giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) – formerly known as Riverdeep – is to create 450 jobs at a new R&D headquarters in Dublin. Riverdeep had its origins in Dublin in 1995 and under the leadership of Barry O’Callaghan became a global name in the e-learning K-12 market space. As an educational publisher, HMH has over 100,000 customers, generating approximately US$2.5bn in annual revenues, profits in the region of US$1bn, and 50 per cent market share of the US K-12 market, the world’s largest education market.

HMH is to establish its global e-learning R&D centre in the greater Dublin area, creating 450 “high-value” jobs over the next five years.

Fiona O’Carroll, senior vice-president, Digital Products R&D at HMH confirmed the Irish Government’s vision to create a knowledge economy by investing in people, research and innovation was a key factor in the company’s decision.

The new R&D centre will be a focal point for e-learning and educational innovation. Employees, partner companies and collaborating universities will be attracted by the quality of research, people, innovation and commercialisation activity in the centre.

The Centre will involve establishing a globally networked team in Ireland with team members and innovation partners based in the US and around the globe. The company said these jobs should be very attractive to seasoned technology professionals, engineering and technology graduates, highly creative thinkers and innovators in the e-learning space.

As I’ve said in the past, Ireland has a vibrant technology and knowledge-based industrial economy, and one of the domains we excel in, is in e-learning – I guess most people in the industry have heard of SmartForce and Electric Paper, for example. These large companies notwithstanding, there are over fifty ‘other’ e-learning development houses in the country. Not bad for a country with a population of under 5 million people.

In my view, this investment will prove to be a game-changer. As it is, you could say that HMH are the only game in (e-learning) town – if they manage the innovations and outputs afforded by this R&D centre correctly, HMH will grow to become the Google of e-learning. Indeed, the Google approach (especially the famed “20 per cent time”) is a perfect model for any knowledge-based organization that wants to stimulate growth through innovative new products invented and developed by their own subject matter experts. Similarly, this R&D centre will provide the organization with the potential benefits of having an audience for life: if HMH products have the skill and facility to instil the joy of learning in the kids that they currently provide e-learning solutions for, they will have an audience for life, given that these Digital Natives (click on the link for Marc Prensky’s seminal article) will grow up associating the brand with discovering knowledge and the fun of learning. In essence, we can say that the company has the potential to mould a whole generation of learners, which is an extraordinary business opportunity, but also a huge responsibility.

Do I now hear the distant trumpet of an approaching elephant?

I do…

Just an observation really. Rumours of this investment have on the jungle telegraph here in Ireland for some time now, and I was originally going to post on this topic last Thursday (the day of the announcement).

An African elephant (sans room)

I held back, because I wanted to see what reaction would come for the Irish L&D and e-learning blogosphere. I’m disappointed to say that no-one has posted a reaction to the largest investment in their industry, ever.

I’m sure people are still formulating their thoughts – I for one want to read how others in the e-learning industry here in Ireland are responding to this investment.

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References:

HMH to Create 450 Jobs and Base Global R&D Headquarters in Dublin. Enterprise Ireland Press Release. [Internet] Available from: http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/eicms/interiorpage.aspx?NRMODE=Published&NRORIGINALURL=%2FNews%2FPress%2BReleases%2F2008%2FPressSep102008.htm&NRNODEGUID={077DB63F-4925-4D96-BEB3-364BF11C8EB1}&NRCACHEHINT=Guest

[Accessed 10th September 2008]

Ireland wins €350m HMH deal after tough worldwide battle. Irish Independent. [Internet] Available from: http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/ireland-wins-8364350m-hmh-deal–after-tough-worldwide-battle-1473370.html

[Accessed 10th September 2008]

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Each of us had the facility to access a personalised version of the types and diversity of information and knowledge on display in Times Square, NY. Is this the ultimate immersive learning environment?

Ten years ago, who would have though you could “Broadcast Yourself” a la YouTube? There is a booth on W44th St that allows you, for a few dollars, to add your own video imagery and text message content to one of the jumbotrons on the Square; is this the beginnings of Times Square as a wiki?

[Click on image to view full-size]
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I completely agree with Steve’s assessment; the challenge as I see it, is for e-learning practitioners to address traditional/institutional ways of thinking in organizations about how to leverage the benefits of e-learning – break the habits of a lifetime in a sense.

Most decision makers (i.e. C-level executives) in organizations are from a generation that would not have extensively used e-learning during their formative years. In my experience, they become much more risk-averse during economic downturns and push back on what they see as innovation in tough times.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a VP about two years ago. I was working on a proposal to introduce an on-demand pre-classroom training module for a ILT course – a bit of blended learning to reduce the workload on instructors to ensure that learners were of an appropriate skill level to actually attend the course in question. His response to the proposal was along the lines of “it’s all very well being leading edge, but we don’t have to be bleeding edge.”

Now, this was hardly an all-singing, all-dancing 3D PLE we were proposing here, just a little 30-minute Flash-based presentation. I think that the assertion this VP made represents that we, as learning professionals, have to be cognisant of more conservative attitudes that exist in the workplace, and we need to develop strategies to counter such lines of argument.

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• Training for a Recession – Allen’s Learning Blog
• US Economy and e-Learning in 2008 – G-Cube Solutions
• Classrooms 2.0; Learning in a Recession? – Elliott Masie

Brent Verhaaren on the Allen Learning Blog outlines some very helpful tips for training departments to anticipate and (hopefully) negate the the impact reduced revenue on them, including:

• Do the Numbers
• Talk to the Right People
• Tighten Your Belt
• Be Consistent
• Look to Past Recessions

And most importantly there No Time Like the Present to evaluate the potential affect a downturn on your organisation.

Here’s a quick look back at the the contribution of Irish-owned e-learning companies to the industry:

Back in the 1980’s “Computer-Based Training” was the coming thing, and Irish-based CBT Group (CBT Systems in North America) were one of the originators of the industry. They specialised in self-study courses that users could take at their own PCs. CBT developed a library of more than 600 titles for client/server, Internet, intranet, and mainframe platform deployment.

By the mid-to-late 1990’s, there was an explosion of Irish entrepreneurs exploiting gaps in the on-line learning market:

• Prometheus developed the “CompuTutor” range of products for the MOUS and MSCE audience.
• Transware PLC founded to meet the localisation needs of e-learning organisations.
• KnowledgeWell and Riverdeep begain making inroads into the K-12 sectors.
• Electric Paper began development of the first courseware for the ECDL qualification.
• EMG developed the skoool.ie initiative in association with The Irish Times and Intel (Ireland) Ltd.

By 1999, the CBT Group had transformed itself into SmartForce, “the e-learning company.” Following convergence in the marketplace after the dot-com crash, a new raft of e-learning organisations emerged:

• EP, Creative Learning Media, A-V Edge and MindLeaders have all merged into the ever-expanding ThirdForce.
• In 2002, SmartForce merged with another virtual classroom leader, Ireland-based SkillSoft Corporation.
• Also in 2002, Barry O’Callaghan led an MBO of Riverdeep. Since going private, the organisation has acquired the assets of The Learning Company, Broderbund, Edmark, and most recently (2007) merged with Houghton Mifflin, to become the fastest-growing e-learning consultant in the US.

In 2008, for Ireland to hold on to it’s hard-earned status as a global e-learning leader, it must maintain the momentum that’s been built up over the past 20 years.

Certainly some signs are good: companies like Intuition, InnerWorkings and CompuPharma continue to innovate in the fields of finance, adaptive learning environments for programmers , and pharmaceutical training respectively. The National College of Ireland and the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland in particular are leading some very interesting initiatives in adult learning and post-graduate skills development. Specialities in adaptive learning and other third-generation e-learning solutions are being investigated in Trinity College, Dublin and the University of Limerick.

However, unlike our neighbours in the UK (who’s government-backed education policy has the mantra “Education, education, education”), we in Ireland have a government who’s lack of vision concerning this sector is downright embarrassing, if not ignorant.

A salutary lesson might illustrate my point at this stage of the post.

We are all agreed that e-learning is about channelling digitally-mediated content via networks like the internet. Yes? Therefore, without an effective high-speed network in place the development and delivery of high-quality learning products will be hindered.

In Ireland, our broadband is a mess. It’s been said that we are a first-world country with third-world comms infrastructure. In fact it’s worse than that; the Eamon Ryan, the minister whose responsibility it is to develop the comms infrastructure doesn’t know the difference between high-speed internet availability and quality of service – as an example, here’s an excerpt from a recent Sunday Times article:

John McElligott, the managing director of eBay in Ireland, has called on the minister to take a “quantum leap” by investing in NGNs, bringing Irish broadband speeds closer to the 100 megabits per second (Mbits/s) enjoyed in some countries. Irish download speeds for residential broadband users are a maximum of 12 Mbit/s. Most of the country operates on speeds of 1-2 Mbit/s. Ryan said McElligott was “right to be ambitious”, but questioned his thinking. “John runs eBay. When he starts running a construction company, he can advise me on digging holes to every home in the country,” Ryan said.

I would guess that if you’re outside of Ireland, dear reader, your jaw is dropping at the supreme irony of a leading digital development hub and world-leading economy, and the steam-powered infrastructure we have to negotiate on a daily basis.

But that’s not why we’re here today. We’re here today to welcome a new, Irish, e-learning blog to the blogosphere: welcome Brian Mulligan and the E-learning Ireland blog!

Click on the link under the E-learning Blogs panel to the right of this post to check out what his blog is about.

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My initial response to her was “there’s no recession… yet!” Later, I reflected on the implications of the current economic slowdown (whether or not it turns into a recession) for the e-learning industry.

The dialectic I am presenting here can be summarised in the following manner: will the positive economic, organisational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses to recessionary times? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

So what’s changed in the e-learning industry since the last recession in 2001? I’ve outlined some discussion points below:

1. First of all: Traditional business practise
2. Developments in Infrastructure & Hardware
3. The E-learning Hype curve
4. Refinements in Content Development Methodologies
5. The Rise if the Read/Write Web
6. The Playstation Generation – Digital Natives in the workplace

Scroll down to find out more about each of these points.

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Traditional business practise
Historically, when a slowdown or company rationalisation occurs, the first against the wall are the folks in the PR, marketing, and training departments. Typically, individuals and organisations revert to previously-learned behaviours in tough times; this usually means going through the process of carrying out tried-and-tested, though not necessarily logical responses to the problems put in front of them. The rationale is as follows:

• Profits are down
• Revenue projections aren’t great for the next 12/18 months
• We need to cut our costs
• We need to keep the guys that make the widgets (we need to have product to sell)
• We need to keep the managers of these people (or productivity will go down)
• We need to keep Human Resources in place to manage everyone obviously (it’s just a coincidence that I – that is the decision-maker – work in HR!)
• What about those training people? High travel costs for the ILT guys, they pull people out of work for 3 days to go on courses. Large budgets spent on implementing and maintaining an LMS/LCMS, third-party e-learning libraries, custom courseware etc, but they do seem to add value to the organisation. And let’s face it, they don’t really improve the quality of our product, because they never convince us with their ROI metrics…

• Outcome: tea and sympathetic chat, and the Training team get their pink slips / P45s.

Sadly, I reckon that this will be strategy undertaken by a significant number of organisations over the next year or so. However….

…and it’s a big however.

Let’s look at the evidence for factors that have changed in the e-learning industry since 2001 and the recession following the Dot-Com crash.

Infrastructure & Hardware
More-or-less general availability of high-speed internet access just wasn’t there in 2001. To take the example of the company I worked for at the time, our high-quality courseware was developed in Authorware and Director and delivered to customers on CD-ROM for distribution via their intranet or accessed directly from the disk. Our on-line courseware was a ‘lite’ version of the CD material – not out of choice, but because of the limited functionality that could be provided to a user via a 56k connection.

Over-compressed images, poor animation, and very poor audio – hardly the immersive learning solution that e-learning flattered to promise at the time. Assuming the learner could access the content successfully, the chances were that the PC (for it was always a PC) that they were using to view their content was processing and displaying the date at a rate that we wouldn’t find acceptable on a PDA now (screen-size excluded). Pentium or pre-Pentium processors, 8-bit sound cards, 16 colours, 800×600 pixel displays. And so on.

In short, we could see the potential, but our imaginations exceeded the available technology.

The e-learning hype curve
This brings me neatly to the e-learning hype curve (see Figure 1). Kevin Kruse described 2001 as the year that

…brought the harsh, steep slope of unfulfilled promises. Several high-profile providers shut their doors while many more announced large-scale layoffs in the face of missed revenue targets and crashing stock prices. E-learning advocates retreated to the more defensible ground of “blended learning. This year [went] down as the Trough of Despair.

Figure 1. The E-learning Hype Cycle

I would suggest through familiarisation and use, learners expectations are more reasonable about what can be achieved (and perhaps more importantly how it can be achieved through digitally mediated delivery). Given this environment, organisations are now more willing to invest in e-learning as part of their overall training strategy. But is it perceived as a necessity or a luxury?

I can’t answer that question right now. I suspect that I will be able to answer it 12 months from now, because there will be evidence as to whether decision makers consider e-learning to be a core requirement that effectively meets organisations’ training needs.

Content development methodologies
This kind of ties in with this month’s Learning Circuits Big Question about instructional design. Without going into the history of this too much, the development of (relatively) easy-to-use authoring tools like Captivate, Articulate (and a whole raft of others), Rapid E-Learning development methodology and the disintermediation principle means that e-learning has fewer up-front costs associated with it than at the turn of the century.

Similarly, if it’s done correctly at the outset, ongoing maintenance and support costs are lower than they ever have been. By developing content with smaller, more flexible teams, the value proposition of e-learning has been enhanced, and the total cost of ownership has been significantly reduced. Outside of e-learning, the take-up of podcasting and streamed media on sites like Blogger and YouTube demonstrates that this ease-of-use of tools and technologies has extended into the community at large.

The Read/Write Web
Who would have thought in 2000 that blogging, social networking, wikis and podcasts would be as big a part of life as they are now? At the start of the century, the Web (and e-learning) could at best be described as a half-duplex medium; it was pretty much all one-way traffic. The development of information platforms has facilitated knowledge-sharing, folksonomies, social interaction, and, key to all this, reciprocity.

We now live in a multiplex world of many voices and ideas, mediated by the internet. At the forefront in using these web technologies is the e-learning industry. By using these tools to develop content I feel we can demonstrate quite effectively that e-learning has a value now that it did not have a decade ago. I would assert that this is particularly true if you take a social-constructivist approach to learning. By the way, I’m happy to entertain debates about the role of formal as opposed to non-formal and informal learning in this environment.

The Playstation Generation
Concomitant with the read/write web is the Playstation generation that have grown up over the last number of years. In his seminal essay Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), Marc Prensky declares:

…students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college graduates have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

Extending from this, there is a generation of workers who are comfortable with and practised in the concepts and use of e-learning – take a look at the resources available on www.skoool.ie, an initiative for second-level students in Ireland. I was involved in the development of the first iteration of this site, and it’s changed a lot (for the better) since we took those first steps creating it 8 years ago. Similarly in third-level education, there have been significant developments in on-line learning, and I think that it’s fair to say that it has become quite embedded in the pedagogy employed by universities: tools like Moodle enable students to upload coursework, take tests, build their own knowledgebases and wikis, and have on-line discussions through a single point of access.

This generation is in the workplace right now. It will expect to learn new skills as their careers develop using the tools that they have always learned on in the past: that is, by using e-learning.

Conclusion
I’ve left loads of stuff out here; this is a blog entry, not an essay. But consider other factors including transport costs and training in the era of $100 a barrel oil and the value of virtual classrooms; the ROI of e-learning as opposed to traditional methods; even the impact of traditional ways of teaching on the environment (”e-learning” becomes “eco-learning” anyone?).

I may well return to this topic again. But at this point I want to put the question out there: how do you think e-learning will fare in the next 18 months, particularly if there are tough times ahead?

References:

Kruse, K. (2002) The State of e-Learning: Looking at History with the Technology Hype Cycle. [Internet] Available from: http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/hype1_1.htm [Accessed 12th February 2008]

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrats. [Internet] Available from: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/
Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20
Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf [Accessed 14th February 2008]

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