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e-Learning forum looks at industry trends

Industry trends and issues were on the agenda at last month's meeting of the Tata Learning Forum. The conference, held in London, was organised by e-learning company TATA Interactive Systems and attended by around 150 people.

The conference heard from IBM's Piero Graneli who revealed findings from IBM's survey of CEOs in 2004. According to the survey, CEOs believe that the biggest challenge to top line growth in their businesses is 'people issues' - especially 'education'.

In his presentation, Sanjaya Sharma, CEO of TATA Interactive Systems, identified five major trends in the modern world of learning:

• The delivery of learning materials to mobile devices is increasing rapidly
• Outsourcing both HR activities and the production of training/learning materials is also increasing rapidly
• Increasingly, many training managers are being expected to rollout learning programmes globally - which indicates the growing globalisation of business
• Those providing the input for learning programmes - the teachers - are, increasingly, being drawn from anywhere in the world, making their knowledge and expertise available to anyone, anywhere in the world, and thus making 'learning' a truly global activity
• The growing realisation that 'learning' is merely a blanket term - like 'fruit' rather than 'banana', 'mango', 'apple' and so on. Consequently, those commissioning 'learning programmes' are becoming more discerning and, so, are now asking for 'simulation-based', 'story-based' or other, more specific forms of learning materials

Other topics covered during the conference included 'Accessibility and e-learning', with contributions from British Airways' Alison Walker and David Prescod, of BECTA. Prescod commented that learning materials producers must translate generic standards to specific products - especially products related to IT skills. He said that the way to make these learning programmes accessible by disabled people is to shift the paradigm on which they are constructed from simulation to application training.

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