Written by At this time of year we’re preoccupied with ‘faddy diets’, gruesome detoxes and – if you’re in corporate learning – the annual Learning Technologies Exhibition in London at the end of January.
Learning Technologies is usually an opportunity for learning professionals like us to get together to share war stories, and look at the latest technological trends in the industry. It’s a broad church that encompasses a multitude of technology vendors from software giants such as SAP offering complete Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, to boutique e-learning companies and everything in between.
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In recent years most of the buzz has been around social learning and mobile learning. This year’s conference marked another important step in the evolution of what could be real “game changers” for the learning industry and most importantly the customers that it serves.
The opening seminar by Amit Garg at Upside Learning got a lot of interest with over 50% of the audience considering their first mobile learning project during 2014. Amit used a series of case studies to illustrate how mobile (not to mention tablet) learning has progressed over the past 2-3 years, and highlighted the myriad of challenges involved in designing, testing and supporting multiple formats and platforms with video being increasingly used.
The increased demand for video was a recurring theme and also the focus of several vendor seminars. Catherine de Salvo from Scott Bradbury highlighted the need for video content to be short (about 2 minutes), practical, relevant, simple, engaging and immediately useful.
Social learning solutions were well represented again by several vendors – including SuccessFactors, an SAP Company. Lars Morch showcased SAP’s enterprise social network solution called “SAP Jam” and how this had been used with great effect at Welcome Break – one of the UK’s largest motorway services operators. The old intranet was effectively replaced by SAP Jam and provided Welcome Break with a next generation collaboration platform that combined with the SuccessFactors HCM platform can be used by its 4,500 employees across 28 UK sites.
I couldn’t help thinking that whilst it’s still early days for social and mobile, there is definitely momentum building behind what should be an extremely compelling business case for these two young upstarts of the corporate learning market. As always, Learning Technologies 2014 was a good way to start what could be an interesting year…