The second wave: even if you wiped out on the first e-learning wave, a second one is coming. Catch the ride

T+D, Oct, 2002 by Craig R. Taylor

There's a lot of talk in e-learning circles these days about the arrival of the "second wave." Granted, just trying to catch a ride on the first wave proved a challenge for some would-be e-surfers. But in nearly every facet of the e-learning movement, signs are that the next wave is coming. And in spite of gloomy reports and the shaky economy, the second wave may be rolling in faster than you think.

"The marketplace is shifting in maturity," says Tom Graunke, CEO of e-learning firm KnowledgeNet knowledgenet.com. "We're beginning the second wave of e-learning. Buyers know what they want; now it's all about deploying against their business needs."

It's tempting to dismiss that as so much promotional rhetoric--cheerleading for a losing market. But if he and others are right that the e-learning world is evolving into a new phase, where are the telltales? If true, what changes can we expect, and what impact will they have?

In upstart industries such as e-learning, big ideas, experimentation, trial-and-error, excitement, creativity, and sometimes disappointment and frustration characterize the first wave of growth. It's all about trying to figure out what works and works best. As we've seen during the past two years, some ideas never succeed--regardless of how much time and money are invested. Bad ideas usually fail. Good ideas gain momentum and support, followers and advocates. From a macro perspective, the culmination of enough good ideas will ultimately reach critical mass, and the second wave is beginning to rise.

The second wave signals the arrival of greater standardization and the emergence of replicable processes. More and more people are adopting the good ideas and building on them. Norms are emerging. Winning ideas from instructional design methods to profitable business models are beginning to achieve broad support. Creativity, a key driver from the first wave, will, in the second wave, improve best practices. It's when all of those dynamics come together that the growth of a ream, an organization, or an industry accelerates. For e-learning, the signs are all around us.

Architect-ing the second wave

For compelling evidence of the arrival of e-learning's second wave, look first at the evolution of the standards movement.

"Standards will do more to accelerate the e-learning marketplace than anything else. Period," states an emphatic Terry Nulty, president of e-learning developer and publisher Element K elementk.com.

To fully understand the impact that standards (such as SCORM) will have, it's useful to view e-learning as three distinct segments:

* content

* services

* technology.

During the high-octane days of e-learning's first wave, content developers pursued multiple instructional design approaches using several distinct authoring tools. Meanwhile, technology companies such as Docent, Saba, and Click2learn were independently building sophisticated--and proprietary-learning management systems.

The now-familiar problem was that the different content formats didn't easily connect within the available infrastructure systems. Lack of integration and interoperability across the systems became a frustrating situation for users--requiring unexpected time and energy in the launch of an e-learning project. A lot of people got burned. The technology certainly didn't work like suppliers promised it would. It was over-promise, under-deliver to the minds of many early purchasers. Tech-support teams had to come to the rescue to knit components together, adding more time and expense.

As standards become more refined and widely adopted, they'll go a long way to fixing all that. "Standards and interoperability," notes Graunke, will be "the single most critical elements in the success and adoption of e-learning in the future." It's true that standards initiatives are still evolving, but the vision of widely available, seamless plug-n-play courseware is right around the corner. The ability to integrate content with platforms "should rake hours, not months," adds Graunke.

King Content

One of the more frequently heard exclamations in e-learning is "Content is king!"--a phrase borrowed from the high-growth days of the Net to differentiate the technologies being developed (the "pipes") from the content that users viewed on their screens. Financially speaking, content is certainly king. U.S. spending on e-learning content far exceeds spending for services and technology, with some estimates of content spending reaching US$8 billion or more by 2004.

The main point: No matter how sophisticated the technology is or how flashy the graphics and images are, it's the quality and relevance of the content to the business issues and learner objectives that win the day. Great content matters. In the traditional instructor-led world, one of the ways training and development programs differentiate, we have to admit, is in the skill of the instructor. We've all experienced a time when weak material in the hands of a gifted trainer still resulted in valuable knowledge transfer and skill acquisition. In the world of e-learning, weak content has no ally. It's just weak.