Limbic Learning

Briefing: March 2010

• Acquisitions: a couple of acquisitions of note have been in the news over the past month. First is the acquisition of Skillsoft, the huge Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) supplier of e-learning. Second, US based e-learning company Kaplan IT have bought UK based rapid authoring tool company Atlantic Link. Acquisition activity is a definite sign of a strong e-learning market.

• A new report out by US market research company Ambient Insight (you can download the executive overview here) predicts... growth in e-learning! Over the next 5 years it projects smoothed out growth looks like being 12% per year in the European Union - which means by 2014 the value of the e-learning market will practically have doubled. Although the EU is currently the second highest value market (behind North America) by 2014 it's projected to be third - behind Asia. This seems likely.
  
  But don't go betting on the actual figures just yet: the likely thing is that there' is growth, but the actual figure provided every six months or so is usually significantly different from the previous one. It's up from previous figures (late 2008 and late 2009) but still only around half the value cited at the start of 2008.

• An announcement by the Pentagon confirmed that with immediate effect the US Department of Defense had opened up to social networking. Commenting on the move David Wennergren, deputy assistant secretary of defense for information management and technology, said: "The world of Web 2.0 and the Internet provides these amazing opportunities to collaborate. It not only promotes information sharing across organizational boundaries and with mission partners, but also enables deployed troops to maintain contact with their loved ones at home."
  
  It'll be interesting to see if the MOD is prepared, or able to open most of its low-risk systems up in the future. More details can be found on the US DoD's website.

• Mobile Competition. The US knows how the smartphone is set to drag mobile
  e-learning back into the spotlight thanks to 'App' frenzy. Telecom giant AT&T's yearly Big Mobile on Campus challenge is offering a $10,000 first prize scholarship to a US student who creates the best app for... e-learning! It's a great idea, especially as entrants will know the user base better than anyone else - it's them! We'll check back in November to see what wins.

• Twitter announced that in February the number of 'Tweets' hit 50 million per day! A year ago this figure was c2.5 million - this is a phenomenon. For sure the smartphone will be helping this figures continue to rise, as twittering is a great mobile activity.

• Facebook with 400 million users (that's 1 in 17 of the world's population) is king of content sharing by users - with one study showing it ahead of email. Traffic statistics to websites are now showing the big social network sites, including Twitter and MySpace as well as Facebook, are seriously challenging search engines for referrals. The hitwise blog had some great stats: Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits to news sites, and Facebook 3.52% for January 2010. Just think of what a well constructed formal/ informal approach using these technologies could do for organisational learning in the future knowing this...
  
  And it doesn't end there. A recent top 50 ranking of unique visitors to sites for January 2010 shows Facebook and YouTube continuing to grow. Yet again, the surge of mobile access helps push these sites up and up.