E-learning Trends that will Dominate in 2020
Since the
early days of e-learning, its benefits have significantly outweighed those of
face-to-face training. The rapid growth of the internet and mobile devices has
made e-learning flexible, time-saving, and cost-effective in training.
This has highlighted e-learning as an essential part of education
market growth. Companies have adopted e-learning as a more flexible and
effective way to train their employees. Additionally, customer education is
becoming more and more popular as an innovative marketing tactic.
However, we are far from reaching an upper limit. The current and
future trends in e-learning prove that it is a field for continuous innovation.
It is true that the e-learning market size is expected to grow beyond $300 billion by 2025
What we saw last year emerging as a top trend will probably
continue to build up and transform in the new year until it is mature or
replaced by a better or different technology or method.
Where do we see e-learning heading for the new year?
There are so many “so-called experts” out there promising you
one-week success and opportunities that fall from the sky.
But, in reality, it requires a lot of hard work, study,
experimentation, and persistence. You need to be continuously informed about
the new trends in e-learning so that you can keep up with new students.
That is why we reached ten different e-learning experts to ask
them what they believe the trends for 2020 are.
Their answers reveal exciting new trends that will change the
e-learning scene, given that we will do really hard work to provide amazing
learning experiences and stand out in the e-learning field.
Here are the top e-learning trends for 2020, according to the
experts. Feel free to navigate to each one of them!
Also, let
us know what you think about them!
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Table of contents
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Made withVisme Infographic Maker, Source: LearnWorlds’ Elearning Trends
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1.Curriculum as a Community
Curriculum as a community is based in a learning environment where
participants engage with the content and – more importantly – with each other.
Online collaborative activities allow all participants to expose their ideas
and thereby create an interactive canvas of diverse reactions and feedback.
According to Jeff Cobb, a veteran
of 20 years in the e-learning industry and owner of learningrevolution.net:
“Curriculum as a
community is a trend that will really help you stand out in a crowded market
and achieve real learning results.” – Jeff Cobb
Jeff refers to, as an example, an environment with carefully
designed questions for students, 24/7 discussion, and a team of facilitators
who work to connect learners and keep them engaged.
Indeed, creating a community will help you stand out. A community in
online courses provokes the students to participate and learn together.
Learning is a social activity by itself. We learn through contact and discourse
with another person who is more competent in the field. Speech and conversation
with one another generate knowledge that is negotiated and subjected to endless
talk.
This is why Bill Brandon, Senior
Editor at Learning
Solutions Magazine, also believes that peer-to-peer applications
that drive collaborative learning will be an actual trend for 2020.
Online collaborative learning engages students in higher-order
thinking skills. It can be either synchronous or asynchronous, and usually is
instructor-led and text-based. The instructor is the facilitator of the group
discourse and acts as a mediator between learners.
In an online learning platform, what you need to look for is a
built-in social network page where you can empower your active community and
allow students to be bonded and actively involved in the school.
An example of a LearnWorlds community
However, building a learning community is neither automatic nor
straightforward to achieve. The instructor has to understand the structural
elements of learners’ communication and their motivational layers. All you have
to do is to learn easy ways to build an online learning community in 2020.
2.User-generated Content
An inevitable trend that arises from the curriculum as a community
in 2020 is User-Generated Content. Christopher Pappas thinks
that this trend will reign supreme in 2020.
User-generated content is what actually the
phrase says: “Learners develop content and share it with their peers.
It can refer to videos, blog posts, testimonials, pictures, tweets, ebooks, and
any type of content.”
Imagine how you could decrease your time and money budget by using
content generated by your students.
Obviously, user-generated content campaigns have been a constant
player also in the marketing world because people crave stories from real
people, and they want interaction with other humans. It is not a coincidence
that 92% of people are more likely to trust a recommendation from
another person over branded content.
User-generated content is so effective because it’s authentic, it
creates a sense of community, and it’s cost-effective. This tactic, which is
very easily done within an LMS, benefits learners and facilitates knowledge
sharing.
Users can upload their resources to the system through any device
and share their content. It really relies on the existence of a strong team
where everyone helps each other to achieve shared goals.
Imagine people sharing examples (in the form of videos, pictures,
or text) of how and why they used your products. And we are talking about REAL
examples, not the ones you have to create on your own as your brand
representative.
You will have valuable examples of your product’s fans. All you
have to do is give incentives to people to produce such material.
3.Smart Content Curation
One of the learning trends for 2020 is Smart Content Curation. It
refers to the manner we treat our educational material, given that our students
don’t have time to discern the necessary information in them.
According to Christopher Pappas,
the founder of eLearning
Industry’s Network, the largest online community of professionals
involved in the eLearning field, a smart content curation, requires excellent
content organization, omission, and optimization.
That means that every time we design new learning content, we have
to think:
·
Is our information
targeted enough and suitable for our target audience?
·
Which sites can we rely on
for up-to-date, relevant information?
·
How will we deliver the
targeted takeaways learners need?
·
How will we show that we
own our learning material?
·
How will we curate the
course design?
All these questions must be thoroughly answered by an online
instructor, because as Christopher says:
“Offloading information
in bulk will only lead to cognitive overload and disengaged learners. As such,
you need to be smart about how you curate content online and disperse it to
your target audience.” – Christopher Pappas
And Panos Siozos, the CEO
and co-founder of LearnWorlds, adds that:
Just throwing a video or
a pdf at someone and considering this to be e-learning, doesn’t cut it anymore.
Users demand great aesthetics, outstanding design and typography, and
expertly-designed user journeys. Investing in the design of your online school
and learning content is not a luxury but a necessity.” –
Panos Siozos
To achieve optimal content delivery, instructors must adopt a plan
to design a course. We are talking about instructional design – the systematic
development of instructional material using instructional theory.
It is the process of analyzing learning
goals and adapting specific learning strategies and methods to
achieve those goals and ensure the quality of instruction. Here is an example
of an engaging instructional method:
Poppy Hill, a talent development, e-learning expert,
and a Certified Performance Improvement expert (CPT), founder of Polygon
performance, emphasizes storytelling as a
method to make your content engaging.
People are evolutionarily hardwired for stories. Storytelling and
e-learning are a natural pair.
“Stories engage us in
emotional, shocking, funny, and memorable ways, so information sticks. In my
e-learning, I use animated scenarios for storytelling, narrated voice with
appropriate graphics, and even stories embedded in quizzes or practice related
to the content I’m teaching.” – Poppy Hill
Poppy also recommends one method to follow: Once upon a time
(Introduction, People and Setting), Suddenly (Problem Action, Conflict), and
then (Solution/Journey, Elements) Happily ever after (Results, Action).
There is a variety of such methods used in e-learning you can
search for to compose your instructional design. Instructional design is often
developed by a certain person in a company that is qualified in refining and
organizing the learning content.
The need for such qualified people is what forms the following
e-learning trend for 2020.
4.Emphasis on the Instructional
Designer
According to David Hopkins, an
experienced leader and manager of learning design and learning technology,
author, blogger,
Certified Member of the Association for Learning Technology (CMALT) and Fellow
of the Higher Education Authority (FHEA), what is constant is our attention to
clarity and quality when producing learning materials, as “Technology
comes and goes.”
And who is responsible for the clarity and quality of the learning
material?
From translating original content to the appropriate adoption and
use of the technology to deliver the training, which is more important than
everything, is this person.
More and more companies now hire instructional designers. And
experts now emphasize their role for 2020. An instructional designer:
·
Organizes the learning
content
·
Decides over the learning
objectives
·
Simplifies the learning
content
·
Designs from the learners’
point of view
·
Makes learning experience
fun and engaging
·
Keeps communication with
learners and a lot more
For David, “the
individual must become the focus of the learning experience, not the technology
delivering it.” Technology – in the form of the learning platform –
still has a part to play, but the focus is on how to use this technology to
support the creation of learning materials.
According to this theory, the instructional designer (who often
doesn’t have only one capacity in a company) is the one businesses should pay
attention to.
“This individual is the
unsung hero in many organizations – often the last link in the chain before the
training is released, often the last one in the office beavering away to
complete the learning.” – David Hopkins
Instructional designers are going to be very important in learning
and development in 2020. According to David, when designers
are supported properly in a company, a wide variety of skills, creativity, and
capability is possible.
This picture depicts the severity of roles of an instructional
designer:
Source: So What Do You Really Mean By ‘Instructional Designer?
5.Interactive Videos
Video has always been a trend in e-learning. And it will continue
to be among the future trends. They have been scientifically proven to increase
learner engagement and participation, thus maximize knowledge retention and
ability to visualize the “unexplained”:
How videos visualize the unexplainable
Video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube and Vimeo, and the
explosion of mobile devices, have given a real resurgence in video use.
A rising trend within video learning is Interactive
Videos. As Phil Mayor, the
Creative Director of Elearning Laboratory, an instructional design
company, states:
“Videos fast became the
ideal medium to deliver training. This is easily justified: A well-crafted
video can be engaging and can be distributed relatively quickly. Also,
interactive videos as platforms that allow to become more prevalent.” –
Phil Mayor
Interactivity in videos can be considered a major influencing
factor of the learning success because it is transforming passive watchers to
active learners.
LearnWorlds is one of the platforms that provides interactive
videos. In fact, it is the only one from the most successful platforms that do
so and gives a lot of guidance on how you can jazz up your courses with
interactive videos through a variety of free blog posts and free courses.
What are interactive videos? They are videos that help students
explore further resources apart from the video content with links and
interactive objects appearing in the video.
They allow users to navigate in the content through content
tables, bookmarking, interactive transcripts, and navigational buttons.
What’s more, they include questionnaires with feedback at the
exact moment you want.
Also, interactive videos, in some cases, support dialogues around
the video content.
We can now understand why the traditional video is no longer sufficient on its own.
Craig Weiss, the CEO and Lead Analyst of The Craig Weiss Group and founder of FindAnLMS, also believes that the scene in the learning authoring tools will change:
We can now understand why the traditional video is no longer sufficient on its own.
Craig Weiss, the CEO and Lead Analyst of The Craig Weiss Group and founder of FindAnLMS, also believes that the scene in the learning authoring tools will change:
“All authoring tools
will add more video capabilities, including video bookmarking, transcript, and
low scale video editing.” – Craig Weiss
6.Learning Analytics
With Learning Analytics, instructors view student feedback in
questionnaires, assignments and also see the video engagement – in short – how
students perform in general. This data shows how much time each learner engages
with each activity and helps instructional designers optimize courses.
Most training platforms provide Learning Analytics, which is the
industry-leading tool for tracking and reporting student behavior that can
assist your course development journey every step of the way.
Ryan
Tracey, the E-learning
Provocateur, creator of one of the top e-learning blogs, and
Learning Innovation Manager at Macquarie Group, thinks that data is the next
big trend for 2020.
“I think that data will play an increasingly important
role in e-learning, whether it’s generated automatically via the likes of xAPI
or sourced via more manual methods, to inform the work, we do, and evaluate the
outcomes.” – Ryan Tracey
He emphasizes on the importance of learning analytics by saying
that “Only
with such data can we be confident that we’re adding value to the business.”
Also, Craig Weiss expects
to see more systems incorporating or connecting with Business Intelligence Tools, which will result in extensive
metrics and data. This video explains more about learning
analytics.
In training platform, there are also several tracking tools
concerning course sales like:
·
Google analytics
·
Google tag manager
·
Mix panel
·
Facebook pixel
7.Microlearning
Microlearning is still a rising trend for 2020 and will grow in
importance both in the private and public sectors because of its engaging
nature.
It refers to small bite-sized chunks of information that aim to
teach specific skills. Means of microlearning can be texts, images, videos,
audio, tests, quizzes, games, or a combination of them.
Not strange that microlearning is still a trend. As Panos Siozos says:
“Innovation and
novelties are what most people pay attention to, but there is also a lot of
recycling – in the best sense possible – of good old ideas that get a new lease
of life and find their way into modern practice.” – Panos Siozos
It is a fact that long modules are boring for learners. Smaller
chunks of content are easier to employ and also improve learners’ retention
levels.
According to Barbara Anna Zielonka,
an experienced learning designer and EdTech specialist, top-10 Global Teacher
Prize finalist, with a proven track record in the education sector:
“Not only does
microlearning empower workers, but it also enables employers to close knowledge
and skill gaps.” – Barbara Anna Zielonka
Microlearning is less time-consuming, and cheaper-to-produce and
is surprisingly effective for corporate and commercial training. Personalized
and bite-sized courses are ubiquitously easy to read. Also, smaller courses
with interactive elements appeal to all different types of workers. This is why
Microlearning is a win-win for employees and employers.
Phil
Mayor also sees Microlearning as a trend for 2020.
“Microlearning will
continue to be adopted by organizations as a key way of delivering bite-sized
nuggets of training to their organizations as well as providing a way of
delivering just-in-time training to individuals through the use of RFID and QR
codes.” – Phil Mayor
8.Mobile-Friendly Online Course
Platforms
In conjunction with the still rising trend of microlearning,
ubiquitous learning is taking more and more space. The ability to learn
anywhere anytime is more real now than ever before.
Panos
Siozos says:
“Every time we check out
the analytics of our platform, we see more growth for mobile usage and users
consuming different kinds of content based on the time of day or the device
they have in front of them.” – Panos Siozos
It’s more important than ever to make our courses accessible to
all so that they can watch it from anywhere and anytime. Apart from computers,
it should be made available for mobile phones, tablets, or any other device
that learners are using. This is why:
“What we see today is
this truism taking place in full swing: users accessing their online courses
anywhere anytime, from any kind of device they can get their hands on. At work,
they use their laptop. When commuting home on the train or subway, they use
their large-screen mobile phone, and once they find themselves at the comfort
of their sofa, they revert to their tablet and continue from where they left
off. It’s totally seamless.” – Panos Siozos
For this, its imperative in 2020 to invest in a totally
mobile-friendly platform to host your online courses and start thinking about a
post-laptop learning strategy.
9.Virtual Conferences
Another popular trend in e-learning for 2020 is Virtual
conferences. A virtual conference is an online event that brings together a
group of people with similar expertise so that they can learn from one another.
They occur entirely online rather than in a physical location.
According to Jeff Cobb virtual
conferences have solved the problem of declining attendance at traditional
face-to-face events. Organizations now hold conferences to gain more traction
and they start capitalizing on the advantages that virtual conferences provide.
Such advantages are the ability to:
·
Provide a more
personalized experience
·
Leverage existing
e-learning content and
·
Spark ongoing community
and conversation
Hosting a virtual conference has a lot of benefits:
1.
You can build a large
email list fast
2.
You can raise your
visibility
3.
You build rewarding
relationships with influencers
4.
You become an authority
5.
It is a great business
model
This is why Jeff also says:
“We’ve been fans of
virtual conferences for years at my company and are investing heavily in
growing our own Learning
• Technology • Design (LTD) virtual conference in 2020.” –
Jeff Cobb
10.AI, AR, VR, MR, and VUIs
In 2020 we will also see some changes in the field of user
experience. AI, AR, VR, MR, and VUIs are expected to increase attention and
improve the learning experience.
Bill
Brandon thinks that:
“There will continue to
be a lot of talk about leading-edge technology (VR, AR, AI) and some adoption of
it, but the actual trend will be better design and use of voice interfaces (VUIs)
in performance support roles, and peer-to-peer applications that drive
collaborative learning.” – Bill Brandon
Voice user interfaces (VUIs) allow learners to use a system with
voice or speech commands. Already accessible through smartphones, VUIs allow us
to give commands to computers, eyes, and hands-free users can easily interact
with a product.
Being able to verbalize a Google search instead of typing each
character individually makes information easily accessible and ubiquitous. This
might support students to research facts, check spellings, and look up words or
synonyms without too much distraction from the main task.
To remember trends also popular in 2019:
·
The main task of augmented
reality (AR) is to “enrich” real objects with other capabilities and
characteristics.
·
Virtual reality (VR)
bridges the gap between theory and practice. One of the most beneficial
features of virtual reality is its ability to cut distractions.
·
Mixed reality (MR) is a
totally immersive practice through which learners can interact with a mix of
real and virtual worlds.
·
Artificial intelligence
(AI) models that use algorithms to collect learner data.
Poppy
Hill states that:
Virtual reality is used
to show real-life examples of things the learner may not be able to experience
first hand because it’s too expensive, they need more practice, or it’s
impossible to experience the learning due to other circumstances. –
Poppy Hill
And she gives the following example:
“I’ve
used VR in e-learning by creating a movie in a dairy farm to pasteurize milk.
The movie took place in a dairy pasteurization plant, and the learner could
walk around with an IPAD and press buttons to open doors and learn about
everything in the room. The customer would never let people into their
processing plants to learn, so these videos were the next best thing. They are
easy to make, and you don’t even need special glasses!”
Conclusion
With the e-learning trends we highlighted here, signs are clear
that the e-learning industry will only grow stronger in the coming years. As
technology develops, these trends will get better and better.
Trends come and go, but the e-learning trends seem to maintain a
specific route:
Learner-centered, personalized, accessible, and engaging
e-learning.
Organizations need to pay close attention to these new
developments and adapt what best suits them. As Jeff Cobb, says:
“As online courses have
become commonplace, edupreneurs need models that will stand them out in a
crowded market and achieve real learning results.”
Based on the above trends, these are our suggestions for 2020:
·
Create a strong sense of
community
·
Allow users to exchange
content
·
Curate your learning
material based on the needs of your audience
·
Hire creative
instructional designers
·
Incorporate interactive
videos in your training
·
Use data to improve your
courses
·
Create bite-sized courses
where appropriate
·
Use a mobile-friendly
course platform
·
Organize virtual
conferences, and
·
Adapt leading-edge
technology that skyrockets learning experiences
If you like what the experts told us, give them a small thank you
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