It’s a decisive move, but is it a wise one? Will parents resist higher-cost platforms like the iPad, in favour of cheaper, page-turning e-readers like Sony and Kindle? Only time can tell.

Penguin has made a bold pre-emptive strike. Spotting an opening in this fledgling market it has opted for the expanded functionality offered by the iPad (not to mention the many copycat tablets now scheduled for 2010 launch). It has long been anticipated that media outlets such as newspapers and magazines would be quick on the uptake with app based solutions, which give them the capability to embed images, interactive elements and videos alongside stories, in something resembling an edition of the Hogwarts Daily Prophet.

The main question to ask however (if you’ll excuse a slightly excruciating pun), is whether this will actually result in App-ier readers?

‘… KM is a business practice, e-learning a teaching (learning) technique, online publishing a distribution mechanism. The commonality? The underlying enabling technologies for each are largely the same.’

I recently helped to edit an article on unifying e-learning and knowledge management for a learning and communications company. The article addressed the silo problem within large organisations that divides the two disciplines of Knowledge Management (KM for short) and Training and stops them functioning in useful collaboration. Collaborating usefully is something which, on the face of it, these two disciplines ought to be able to do. After all, both have responsibilities in a similar area: i.e. in what an employee knows, and how that employee can be helped to do a particular job better by knowing new or different things.

In practice, however, KM and Training are two very different communities. They have their own languages, concepts and above all cultures: librarians don’t necessarily feel an instant sense of rapport with trainers (publishers may feel the same way!).

In the article I was editing, the glue proposed to hold these two disparate worlds together was Blended Learning.

Diagram showing unification of blended learning and knowledge management. Property of LINE Communications

Our model, as symbolised in the diagram shown here, had blended learning as the all-embracing design principle with KM activities as components within this design – or, to use the jargon of the e-learning world, as different ‘learning modalities’.  At the time it occurred to me that, had I been working for a KM client, we might be drawing the map very differently; with Knowledge Management as the organising principle, and e-learning as one of many knowledge and information modalities.

We all behave like medieval cartographers when we do these diagrams, putting our home territory at the centre of a map, so to speak. But before I get on to why I think there is a certain degree of justification for drawing the map in this rather e-learning-centric way, we should pause for a word or two about Blended Learning.

What is Blended Learning?

Blended Learning (for those who don’t know) is the combination of traditional stand-up training with e-learning. In its initial form it was largely about bolting self-paced modules of online learning onto pre-existing stand-up courses, but over the years it has gained more sophistication, and confounded the doubts of early naysayers who doubted its ability to scale.

Nowadays it can involve a wide variety of different components, both online and offline, orchestrated so as to make the most efficient and effective use both of trainer resources and trainee time. It’s a very diverse picture, but let me try to sketch for you an indicative example, typical of the more leading edge examples being launched within large organisations today.

An enterprise-scale blended learning programme might kick off with a series of webinars, ensuring global message control, and proceed with the help of face-to-face workshops, personal coaching, online videos, modules of self-paced e-learning web-delivered via computer and/or smartphone, and online assessments.

The rise of Web 2.0 has had an impact on blended learning as well, widening the available online tools to include blogs, wikis, rss feeds, and social networking. Typically, a large-scale programme will have its own dedicated learning portal, linked to a Learning Management System which tracks and reports on assessment scores, completions, etc. – and this portal can provide a focus for online Web-2.0-style collaboration. Somewhere in this mix is often a series of downloadable pdfs, and access to online texts.

The creation of rich-mix technology-enabled training programmes such as this throws a lot of responsibility on the instructional designer, who must co-ordinate all these media in a sensible way to achieve particular learning objectives. Instructional design (or learning design as it is increasingly called nowadays), is the core skill of a service-based e-learning company. The rich mix available to today’s learning designer, a diversity that was not present in the purely face-to-face world, contains the possibility of many interventions which are not, strictly speaking, instructional at all. The provision of access to searchable online texts could be more about reference than learning. Pdfs could be published as part of a compliance programme, for instance, solely to update the learner on new regulations and procedures – where no deep change in attitudes or behaviours is required.

An awareness has spread that there is a spectrum of interventions available within technology-enabled learning, as represented in the diagram below.

‘Depth of training’ really indicates the extent to which the learner’s enquiry is led and mediated. At the ‘deep’ end of the spectrum, educational experiences that involve personal transformation will require much more instructional design than interventions at the other end of the spectrum; instructors/educators provide structure to the experience. At the ‘shallow’ end of the spectrum, learners themselves provide structure and direction; it’s all about access and discoverability.

It’s important to understand that a given blended learning programme might include interventions that fall anywhere along this spectrum. Most do. Given this, it is clear from the paragraph above – if only in the terminology I have fallen into using – that such a programme will necessarily span different disciplines. ‘Discoverability’, for example, is a concept well known to knowledge managers and online publishers, but almost unheard of within e-learning circles. Perhaps it should be better known on that side of the fence, however, since there is more and more talk within e-learning about the importance of ‘the self-directed learner’.

When you look at it from this point of view, Blended Learning is an inherently silo-busting concept.

E-learning thriving, KM just surviving?

So if there really is an opportunity here for a less siloed approach, why should it be under the aegis of e-learning and not the other way round? Why shouldn’t knowledge management lead the charge?

One of the reasons is purely pragmatic. E-learning is an industry in boom, while KM, for the moment at least, looks to be in retreat.

The latest Ambient Insights report on the US e-learning market shows demand growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.4% and revenues to reach $23.8 billion by 2014. This healthy picture is echoed in the UK. A 2009 report by Learning Light, building on work of my own in 2007, forecasts growth rates for UK e-learning of between 6.7% and 8%.

Meanwhile, according to the FT, knowledge management faces a more uncertain future. According to journalist Lucy Kellaway, companies are giving up on any attempt to manage their information, ‘… on the grounds that to do so costs too much. Since the recession began, many have closed their libraries and taken the axe to their knowledge management divisions, set up with such pride and optimism barely a decade ago’. (Published: 22 November 2009)

If information management really is becoming a ‘nice to have’, training seems, in the corporate market at least, to be holding its own. One cynical view of this picture offered to me by an IBM consultant, is that UK organizations train so little, and actually need to do so much, that there just isn’t any slack – no room for cuts. The shift to services, certainly, has made training a less negligible item for corporates. In certain industries – retail banking, mobile telephone sales, hotel and leisure – an organisation’s brand and service values are practically the only real basis of competitive advantage, and for a service-based organization, training offers the only real way to ensure that employees really understand and embody their brand. Organisations have other big needs too – compliance, product training and change management that can only really be met at scale with substantial help from technology.

In most of these programmes, the organisation is profiting from its own knowledge, recycling what it knows already – which is the basic job of knowledge management. But whereas KM is seen as a year round activity, a matter of infrastructure, e-learning programmes tend to be wrapped up in new, one-off initiatives, and are thus less vunerable to cutting.

A learning programme provides the impetus, the motivation, the objective, the unifying story to bring change about and attract investment from organizations, since its returns are often more measureable.

Online publishing and e-learning

This is also true of less immediately performance-related learning programmes, such as those involved with professional development. An organisation with a lot of accountants, for instance, like one of the big consultancy firms, has a strong interest in keeping the professional skills and knowledge of those accountants up to date. Learning programmes that do this can seem to have more urgency and point to them than general improvements in the ‘knowledge infrastructure’. This is especially true where learning is linked to a professional qualification. As in Education, qualifications are something which gives the acquisition of knowledge a shaping rationale and a measurable end-point.

It is in this latter field of professional development that many people expect to see convergence between e-learning and online publishing in the future. And it’s is not just about accountants, lawyers, doctors, nurses, etc.

Recently I was talking to a life sciences publisher, with a big audience for their products in the developing world, who are just about to launch their first e-learning programme. This is vital knowledge, from an authoritative source, linked to professional accreditation, and with a wide potential audience.

It will be interesting to watch developments in this space. Technology enabled learning is now such a rich and varied thing, with so many powerful new channels to exploit, that the potential for development seems huge. As user acceptance and bandwidth grows, the only thing holding us back from more convergence between e-learning, online publishing and knowledge management, will be the lack of mutual understanding. Were these silo walls to dissolve, a creative potential could be unleashed that could surely only benefit all the industries involved.

But that’s not the worst of it. In fact these two very similar groups of companies which do very similar things each has a completely different language, incomprehensible to the other community. And yet you sense a lot of common concepts and aspirations behind the jargon.  Here’s a small compare-and-contrast exercise.

Now that online publishing has moved beyond simply putting books online as pdfs, we are beginning to see a far more active development of the possibilities when it comes to extending the use of texts online for learning. An important next stage in this maturity curve is adding interactive features such as assessment, and learner feedback. Beyond that, we are also beginning to see use of more advanced, ‘Web 2.0′ features, such as the ability to add user-generated content.

And something that’s becoming clear, as academic and reference publishing develops in this direction, is the emergence of areas of convergence between e-publishing and e-learning, which up till now have been distinct fields.

Learning and the Professions

In a previous posting on this blog I highlighted the curious disconnect between the worlds of e-learning and online publishing. I put this down to the fact that the e-learning world is largely focused on organisational training, where books tend to be dispensed with wherever possible. Professional Services, however, is one industry sector where authoritative texts are usually an indispensible part of learning. Becoming a lawyer or an accountant involves ingesting numerous weighty volumes, as the bookshelves in their offices attest. The authoritative text plays a central role here, both for learning and for reference.

One such source book for professional practice is The Royal Marsden Manual of Clinical Nursing Procedures (RMM). A legend in the nursing profession both in the UK and around the world, it is regarded as the standard reference on nursing good practice. RMMonline, the online version of The Royal Marsden Manual, which Semantico has developed for Wiley-Blackwell, makes an innovative use of User-Generated Content to extend the usefulness of this authoritative textbook of nursing best practice. Local trusts can add their own trust-specific procedures (and comments on procedures in the Manual) within a controlled workflow. On the face of it, this might not seem that exciting a concept, but it provides a model for an exciting development in the way professional practice is taught and regulated.

Localising the rules

The trouble with rules, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, is that they need interpretation. All areas of professional practice from banking to marketing are regulated in some way, whether by statute, by guidelines and regulations administrated through regulatory bodies or simply by a requirement to observe codified best practice. But in all these circumstances, the rules need interpretation and localisation. Data Protection legislation, for instance, won’t mean the same for an employee of Facebook as it does for an employee of HMRC. Each organisation has its own issues, its own culture, to which it has to train its employees to be responsive.

No printed book, however comprehensive, can cater for such diversity – but an online manual like RMMonline, mediated and augmented through user-generated content, can do just that. RMMonline has been shortlisted for an ALPSP award, and we expect to see many similar examples springing up in other areas of professional practice.

Blackstone’s Police Manuals Online from OUP, is another online resource that goes beyond the book model, in this case by adding a self-assessment and Q&A tool with allows users to create subject-oriented mock exams on the fly.

Examples from e-learning

On the e-learning side of the fence we have seen analagous developments with, for instance, online versions of revision guides produced by Epic for Letts and Lonsdale. These extend the print version of an educational text by adding personalised revision or test sessions, instant marks and detailed feedback – as well as exploiting the motivational possibilities offered by multimedia presentation.

Personally, I have not seen anything similar in the e-learning marketplace to the RMMonline example, despite much hype and rhetoric about using Web 2.0 for learning, but it is probably only a matter of time before the true possibilities of UGC start to be explored more actively on both sides of ‘the great divide’.

To date, publishers have had a rather limited choice when it comes to placing their content online. It was either a case of using an aggregated portal, which meant sacrificing control over functionality and user experience, or bespoke development, which would give you that control, but at the cost, usually, of a substantial investment in time and budget, and the risk that you might get it wrong. Software design is not a simple thing.

Now the choice has widened. ’Rapid‘ processes and methodologies offer a new set of options.

Rapid thinking in e-learning

Rapid has been big news in e-learning for the last three years or so. In the context of the e-learning industry it means rapid production of learning content, using template-driven tools, and with a fair degree of DIY going on within the Learning department. In the context of online publishing, where authoring is more usually the preserve of … surprise surprise, authors, Rapid thinking has a more useful application in platform development.

The 80–20 rule

At the heart of Rapid thinking is a version of the Pareto principle (80% of your success comes from 20% of its causes). When you apply this to looking at bespoke software developments you see that a disproportionate amount of time and resource is taken up on a project by those features in a specification which lie outside the ordinary, and call for the developer to start with a blank sheet of paper, where more common featuures can be more easily provided because there is usually a previous exemplar (‘here’s one I made earlier’) to start from.

In publishing, content comes in all shapes and sizes; bespoke development is sometimes absolutely called for because needs dictated by the content really are too specific and individual to permit use of an ‘out-of-the-box’ solution. But more often we see that a more pragmatic approach to features specification can have quite dramatic effects on reducing both the time and the cost of development. By jetisoning a few of the nice-to-haves, it really is possible in some cases to achieve 80% of what you want for 20% of the cost – and have your platform up and running in weeks rather than months. Faster deployment can also mean iterative development, another important Rapid concept – but that’s for another post!

In the meantime, for a concrete example of how Semantico has applied Rapid thinking to its own services, take a look at our new SIPP Rapid and SIPP Rapid Plus propositions.

What we’re looking at, in market terms, is two quite distinct industries; of very different scale (e-learning is much smaller), structured differently, and with their own dynamics – each possessing its own distinctive terminology, guru community and media universe. There ought to be more points of contact in the area of education; but in many ways this is where the differences are most marked. If I were to point to one philosophical sticking point that underlies this difference, it would concern an issue close to every publisher’s heart: the status of authoritative texts.

Learning without books

To put it crudely; for one of these communities, learning is all about books; for the other it isn’t.

The e-learning world – as represented at Learning Technologies – is largely focused on organisational training for corporates and large public bodies – that’s where the buyers are. In content terms this tends to involve recycling the knowledge of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) within an organisation rather than relying on external texts, which are more likely to feature as source material for courses than to be directly accessed (I’m generalising a bit here, but in its broad lines this is the picture). This knowledge is served up to a diverse end-user employee population, ranging widely from call centre employees to barristers, that lacks either the basic skills, the motivation or the time to engage with getting their learning from books.

Bespoke content development has historically been the strongest part of the UK e-learning market, with buyers tending to be content-focused (e.g. an HR Director with a brief to improve leadership across the board within her organisation) rather than platform and infrastructure focused. Significantly it is HR that will tend to own e-learning within an organisation rather than IT. In this sense the UK e-learning industry replicates in large part the buying structure of the old-world Training Industry.

In the more supply-side driven worlds of online publishing and the Education market, on the other hand, authoritative texts loom larger. Here the game is more about providing access, platforms and discoverability for a body of available information. Content generation is the job of educators and specialist authors; users are presumed to be more active searchers, and to be less spoonfed, less corralled by instructional events than their organisational counterparts.

However, forces within each of these markets are driving towards more convergence.

Workflow and the Holy Grail

There has been a perception in the e-learning world for quite a while that the current dominant model of e-learning content production – hermetic units of self-paced instruction – has to dissolve into a less directed, more user-centred model in which the learner is placed at the centre of an information-rich online environment encompassing inputs across the whole spectrum from raw data through information to instruction.

There are strong drivers for this trend. Learning within organisations is increasingly moving to a ‘just-in-time’ rather than ‘just-in-case’ basis, motivated by faster product launch cycles, increasingly rapid skills fade and ever-faster expectations around time-to-competence. It’s all about embedding learning within workflow. Indeed, it has become reasonably commonplace for content developers such as Epic to provide tactical, subject-area specific learning platforms as ‘homes’ for e-learning modules which also include content libraries of pdfs for reference materials, RSS feeds and links to other information and data both external and internal, as well as Web 2.0 community features, and so on.

In a separate but perhaps parallel development, thinkers on the ‘e-information’ side of the fence (notably, within Outsell) have been saying for an equally long while that the holy grail of online information provision, for academic and professional publishers at least, is the embedding of timely, relevant information within workflow, and that the future lies with systems which will enable this (see the similarity there?). Reference lies easily alongside instruction in such a user-centred model.

As a result of this parallel movement, where required texts form a part of the learning/reference requirements (e.g. in Law, and in any other professionally certified, qualifications-driven or regulated professional environment), publishers are likely to find their content rubbing very directly up against e-learning content products. The result of this is liable to be a new area of competition (or collaborative synergy) over the issue of who provides the platform – given that the e-learning market encompasses a wealth of developers of learning portals, VLEs, Learning Management Systems etc.

How to get out of the library

This has significant implications for both online publishing and e-learning markets. In the case of Law firms, Worlock sees this convergence bringing learning/compliance within the administrative systems of the firm, and provides the organisation with opportunities to leverage the content resources they already have access to within their tied-in subscription environment. It also provides an opportunity for professional and certifying authorities (such as the FSA, in Financial Services) to tie themselves in with those systems from the point of view of audit and oversight. And the implications are spread out much further than Law. Compliance is on the increase in organisations. It is also one of the most resilient drivers for the growth of e-learning in recent years, as well as being recession-proof.

Perhaps the biggest win in all this, for learning, would be getting out of that Training ghetto and into the organisational mainstream. E-information wonks may feel similarly about getting out of the corporate library!

Across the divide

In David’s opinion, publishers tend to see this picture opportunistically rather than, as he does, philosophically – the implication being that publishers need to take a more strategic view of the opportunities. In Semantico’s opinion the two worlds badly need to start talking to each other. Going forward, this is a conversation we will be doing our best to facilitate and encourage.