eLearning is dead: Long live digital learning

Unfortunately, eLearning has become associated with self-paced linear modules that are often slide-based information dumps with a quiz at the end. But eLearning could be so much more. Learning technologies offer possibilities for powerful social and peer learning, spaced learning over time, and personalised adaptive learning. Instead we get a slideshow with a voiceover and a lot of bored learners. The only benefit to the learner is that it’s fast and they don’t have to attend a face-to-face class.

The Serious eLearning Manifesto was partly a response by the eLearning industry to try to reinvent eLearning. It provides guidance about what eLearning could be if it realised its full potential.

Most organisations have stopped talking about eBusiness and eCommerce and now talk about digital marketing, or just ‘digital’. Use of the term became prevalent during the expansion of mobile technologies and as marketing campaigns became integrated across different platforms; marketing firms needed a way to explain what they did beyond just online or mobile marketing. In Australia there’s a great buzz around the term ‘digital disruption’, which refers to the way that digital technologies are causing a rethink of business models, processes and relationships. Microsoft chief Satya Nadella has stated that ‘every business will be a software business’.

The term that aligns learning with this idea of digital disruption is ‘digital learning’. The workplace learning industry has been a slow adopter of the term, but at Sprout Labs we’re beginning to talk about digital learning instead of eLearning. For me, digital learning is a more holistic term that takes in social learning, performance supports and blended approaches, and also has a great fit with the 70:20:10 concept.