I’ve just caught up with an interesting and excellent article that Josh Bersin wrote in forbes.com last week. In it he provides some exciting data showing how LMSs are far from dying out, they are getting bigger and better.
Click here to read Josh’s article.
Some of the data is more impressive than even he presents, for example, he talks in terms of 500+ LMSs out there worldwide, if you follow the real LMS guru, Craig Weiss, then you will know the figure is more like 620+! But that is a small point.
I go back way beyond Josh and I fear we are heading for another crash, much as happened in the 90s. Back then we also had the concept of MOOCs, large libraries of content which were then being sold on to organisations on the basis of courses were only costing pennies (or cents) per user per course.
Organisations finally woke up to the fact that their employees were expected to spend the majority of their time actually doing their jobs and not going through the massive collection of interesting and available courses.
Organisations already find they have to lock down their corporate systems so as to prevent staff spending too much time on YouTube and the various other social media. I predict that they will have to also do similar when it comes to accessing the big wide world of online learning courses – otherwise no work will get done!
IMHO I believe we should not walk away from the basic functions of the LMS – giving structure to information presented to learners and tracking their performance.
There is a lot to be said for the investment in a new category of learning professionals whose job it is to trawl the internet for the very best resources for their audience and package them, using the simplest of LMSs into appropriate learning solutions which have real provenance.