Learning Technologies 2005, London,

I managed to get to Learning Technologies this year – wanted to see what aspects of e-learning are currently being marketed to corporates. The exhibition was a little disappointing, especially in comparison with the much more lively BETT Show (see BETT entry). Strangely, it also attracts a completely different set of vendors. The only key companies to exhibit at both were Macromedia and the BBC.

It included the usual mix of enterprise systems (LMS, LCMS etc), authoring solutions, content developers and off-the-shelf providers. Nothing really new but I did hear the term ‘rapid e-learning development’ more than once – I guess primarily as a defence against the sometimes extended time that it can actually take to get a good bespoke e-learning course developed. Most of these rapid development tools though are simply variations on the Power Point theme – with the addition of self-test functionality. It’s hard to imagine that ‘anyone’ can produce engaging e-learning courses ‘at the touch of a button’ using these tools especially when you consider that most users’ PowerPoint skills are pretty poor. However, Macromedia’s Breeze product does integrate neatly with Power Point (Breeze gets it’s own menu within the application) and though not a fully featured learning content development tool it does allow basic e-courses to be put together relatively quickly.

I shall be trying Breeze out soon and hopefully using it both to support my own learning programs, and those of my clients. 

Not a lot else to report. Saba weren’t there. Blackboard was also missing. Docent merged last year with Click2Learn and are re-branded as SumTotal (www.sumtotalsystems.com). Tata Interactive were showing some neat bespoke induction programmes developed for Orange, Vodafone and also NTL. I asked them about the development costs of such programmes – between £15k and £20k per hour for the first hour - which is a fairly standard figure for the industry, but don’t forget that Tata send most of their development work to Mumbai. Bespoke development costs – even when you offshore it to India.

If you missed Learning Technologies then you didn’t miss much. Maybe HRD 2005 (www.cipd.co.uk/hrd) will be better for those of us interested in using technology to improve the way organisations train and develop their employees.