Current Trends in eLearning
eLearning being an inherent part of technology has evolved greatly over time. The efforts to evolve eLearning are aimed at improving the learners ‘experience. The new trends in eLearning are expected to make the learners’ experience a valuable one. Let us understand what these latest trends are and how they can enhance the learners’ experience.
· Multi-device Learning
Smartphones and tablets are miniature versions of desktops and laptops. Therefore, whatever you access on the latter can conveniently be accessed on phones and tablets too. Any online training course that you wish to see, can easily be accessed by you on your smart devices. Once this approach is perfected over time, these devices would gain more prominence in the learning sphere because of the effective learning experiences they are able to generate.
· Gamification
Gamification is the concept of incorporating game like elements and game techniques into the conventional eLearning courses to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. It has been observed that people when presented with visual aids, retain anywhere between 10% and 30% of the information. However, people, when asked to actively participate in activities or games while in the process of learning, their retention power shoots up to a surprising 90%.
· MOOCs
Massive Open Online Courses have, until now, been the territory of only top universities. However, in the last few years, MOOCs have become popular with large corporations and organizations as well. In the times to come, we will see many corporations using MOOCs for employee training, future employee training and sharing of knowledge between large companies.
· APIs (Application Programming Interface)
SCORM and Tin Can come to mind when we think of APIs. These programs have pre-built instructions to allow content to flow easily between different LMS platforms. TIN Can goes an extra mile here by allowing user data collection both offline and online. With this feature, API opens up new opportunities in learner progress tracking.
· Flash HTML5 conversion
Talk about responsive design and multi-device compatibility and Flash will fail to fulfil the requirements. With a large number of devices coming up, a single build is required as it can perform across multiple devices. HTML5 promises to fulfill this requirement as it can play audio, video, 2D/3D graphics, and animation, all without a plug-in. Also, HTML5 also gives hardware access, offline storage, and supports cloud-based applications.
