The Future of eLearning

I'm going to try to put on my visionary hat for a second and talk about the future of the eLearning industry.

In order to understand where we're heading, we need to understand where we are today. What we have today is a rather boring landscape of eLearning applications, with a few attempts to leap forward to the next generation architecture, mostly unsuccessful. The major divide is between enterprise eLearning solutions (i.e. learning management systems) and the open-source offering. Orthogonal to the two main directions are a lot of weak attempts to integrate various tools, web applications and services into the eLearning suite, with the goal to enhance the capabilities of the baseline solution.

The Promise of the Virtual Learning Environment

At one point, there was a lot of hype about the VLE as the vision for the future of eLearning, adopted by a large number of professionals in the software and academic community. So what was VLE about? Virtual learning environment goes beyong a simple learning management system. It is a learning environment, a system that encompases an entire range of capabilities, from infrastructure, through learning content, management and administration, delivery and collaboration etc. VLE would be the mother of all eLearning architectures. Except it wasn't.

The Future is Cloudy

The vision of any kind of centralized learning hub is fundamentaly flawed. The future, quite literaly, is cloudy. Only when eLearning solutions start utilizing decentralized architectures such as cloud computing, mashups, rich multimedia content delivery and interactivity (web 3.0) will they achieve it's full potential. This will truly be a leap forward.

Most people think that the eLearning solution of tomorrow will be offered as an SaaS (software as a service). While SaaS does lend itself as the right architectural choice for an increasing number of applications across a wide range of industries, it is only a part of the vision. eLearning solutions of tomorrow undoubtedly have to preserve some of their core capabilities such as student enrollment, courses, grades etc. Those capabilities will clearly remain under thight control of the centralized eLearning system, whether offered as SaaS or not. But what about the learning experience? We are already seeing an increasing number of attempts to integrate content delivery tools into central LMSes. This trend will continue to a point where 90% of the capabilities of an LMS will be under the control of the end-user, mashed up into, what will inevitably become a personalized learning experience. What's going to be crucial to the success of this vision is the open-ness oriented towards widening the integration landscape i.e. open standards.

Let's try to illustrate the vision on a hypothetical eLearning solution of the future:

Imagine logging on to you university website with your Yahoo account. After you log in you create your personal profile by entering personal metadata, preferences, educational background, interests etc. You then proceed to the administrative part where you enroll into a couple of courses. When you visit the website of one of your courses you realize you're taken to a Google Wave where the instructor has invited you to an open discussion about the course material. He plays a video for participants, then invites everyone to a chat session. While you're chatting away with your peers, you realize that some posts are coming straight from Twitter along with photos from the "scene". You immediately change the direction of your discussion to analyze the new information and decide to switch over to a Wikipedia page to research a little bit more on the background of the events that are unfolding, while at the same time continuing to exchange information with your fellow students. You then decide to blog about what you've discovered and you let everyone in your course know to follow up on it. Later that day you receive an email from the system notifying you that your instructor has posted a comment on your blog post as well as entered a grade for you in the gradebook. You did pretty well.

A few key points in the illustration:

• The learning experience was delivered through a mashup of online services, some commercial and some free, ranging from collaborative environments such as Google Wave, a more traditional delivery method such as HTML content, to direct integration with online micro-blogging and macro-blogging services.
• There is no centralized LMS. While some administrative capabilities were managed by a core service, the end-user was never bound to a particular application or web site.
• The quality of the learning experience very much relies on the capabilities of the learning content delivery tools and services that are utilized, whether they're collaborative or micro-blogging. The better these services are, the better the learning experience. This really shows how inter-connected the future of the eLearning industry is with the future direction of the web in general.

Last, but not least, a key quality improvement in the learning experience of tomorrow over what we have today, evident in the illustration: the learner is in the driver's seat. The learner is driving his own learning experience, affecting his learning outcomes.