Are you an elearning xenophobe?

Some 16 years or so ago, an EC report purported to show that the UK was third in an EC league table of elearning usage per head of the population. The table was topped by Ireland and the Netherlands.

 

At the time, amid ‘hardliners' pleas for greater uptake of elearning materials in corporate learning, there was general satisfaction that the UK was among the leaders in Europe in terms of elearning. While Ireland’s position in the table was as a result of attracting EC funds to help develop its ‘elearning industry’, the UK was benefiting from its ‘special relationship’ with the USA. This meant that, in the 1990s, a number of US elearning courseware and systems producing companies were establishing European offices in the UK – principally because they believed that the US and UK shared both a language and culture – and this helped the UK to its exalted position in the EC league table.

 

Since then, US-based firms have come (such as Cornerstone OnDemand, OutStart and Plateau) and gone (including Pathlore and Thinq) and the UK elearning market is maturing into an industry with a number of bespoke elearning developers, augmented by ‘rapid’ and ‘self’ development tools suppliers/distributors (such as Atlantic Link and Trainer1) and systems providers (such as the US-based firms already mentioned plus the Italy-based LCMS/digital repository provider, Giunti Labs).