eLearning Industry: It's Clearly Shifting to Online, but to What Extent?

The eLearning industry is flourishing this year, and the coronavirus pandemic was among the most important factors why more and more students were moving to eLearning in this or that way. So this year the word of eLearning experiences boost as it has never been before. Nowadays even the ones, sticking to the traditional educational paradigm have discovered the power and benefits eLearning and different online-courses provide.

With the growth of the whole industry competition is growing too becoming really fierce. The only way to stay on the top for the companies is to keep their products and services up to date, monitoring the demands of the market all the time. This year some practices appeared and turned out to be game-changers. So if you want to attract more clients to your product and make eLearning apps and projects more profitable, it’s a good idea to leverage the best practices we will discuss in this article.

The eLearning market size

It is a big challenge on its own – to create and maintain an eLearning platform. To be in the game the companies should have not just strong planning skills, but market insights as well. It is the only way to create, maintain, and make an eLearning solution profitable. It seems to be a difficult and demanding way to work over, but looking at the size of the market, its potential growth, and estimated figures, it’s easy to say that the game will be worth the candles.

According to recent data, around 40% of the industry share comes from North America. But the more time goes, the more eLearning is spreading worldwide. Moreover, according to the prognosis, by 2025 the market of eLearning will hike up to $300 billion and surpass this mark. Just to compare: in 2018 the figures were about $190 billion. So it’s easy to see how rapid the growth is.

What are the best edTech practices to be considered?

1. Gamification

In 2018 the gamification concept entered the market and its rose in popularity was amazing. The reason is pretty simple – with gamification, the engagement rate rises substantially. It also enlightens the learning experience, making it more productive and efficient.

Thus passive learning can be transferred to activity with the implementation of gamification. It also makes your platform more appealing to the audience. But there are other benefits the gamification provides. For example, it’s easier to motivate students by adding some rewards at the end of each game session. Do not forget to add feedback, so the students will see the progress they have made and provide you with information about the quality of your product in return.

2. Everything goes mobile

Around 10 years ago the mobile revolution seemed to be something nearly impossible and look where we are now. According to the statistics, most users today access the web using not PC but smartphones. Want more precise figures? Easy. Up to 75% of internet users will use smartphones only to access the Internet by 2025. It meant, in four years. The astonishing idea, right?

It makes clear the way where eLearning should and, actually, will go. Smartphones will hold a huge amount of the market, so a successful eLearning platform should be built taking into consideration this fact. An alternative solution is to create a responsive website, which will work equally well on different devices.

3. Be adaptive

Learning is a process, where it’s impossible to find a solution to fit everyone. And it is an issue for eLearning to cope with. The fact that it’s impossible to implement a system that would be equally efficient for all people is confronting the need to educate large numbers of users at the same time.

In the case of eLearning, direct contact with an instructor is often impossible. It means that one can’t estimate if the material is useful or satisfies the user’s needs. In some cases, it can even be too advanced for some newcomers, and it’s impossible to track too.

It’s where adaptive learning comes. It offers a bunch of solutions to ensure the content satisfies the needs of the audience, the information is appropriate, and matches the users’ experience and level. It does not just provide the tasks according to the student’s level but helps him to grow and develop the skills.

The adaptive learning approach creates tasks and lessons for each student individually based on pre-course tests, user performance, personalized options, and different tracking algorithms. The audience today is extremely demanding and such an approach allows the platform to meet the needs on the highest level.

4. The less – the better

According to the statistics, the most popular lesson format turned out to be a so-called “Microlearning”. It is a practice, involving creating small, short lessons, presented in a form of video, articles, infographics, podcasts, and different combinations of the techniques, mentioned above.

The most common issue today is fast-paced leaves and attention spans. Students don’t have time or patience, as well as the level of concentration to sit for a long time and study, digging into some topic. Microlearning helps to solve these issues, providing the students with chunks of material small enough to be “consumed” during off periods or while commuting.

5. Tracking is the king

One of the crucial points for any business is tracking. And it applies to the eLearning platforms as well. It is relatively simple to implement a tracking system and depends in most cases on choosing the LMS only. So pick the one, suitable for your platform, and the thing is done.

Analytics is important but very often underestimated. It is not just about tracking your students’ progress and the number of lessons they have completed. It’s more about adapting the course according to the needs of your target audience. Thus tracking and monitoring reveal the weak points in the lessons, the course structure, and the platform in general, so it’s easy to distinguish which areas to be improved.

Another way to use tracking is to track and spot talented students, so the company has easy and fast access to the rising stars.

6. Virtual reality (VR)

What can be more engaging and entertaining for the students than VR? However, it is efficient when the target audience prefers visual guides to read manuals. So any visual material can be brought to life, taking learning and your students’ experience to an absolutely different level.

7. Social learning

Social media are impacting not just people’s behavior and habits. Having appeared and flourishing, they have a huge impact on eLearning as well. Students are not separate individuals, sitting in their own places and struggling with learning on their own, not anymore. They can interact, communicate, share their experience, overcoming difficulties together.

But the main benefit of social learning is that students are interacting with real people, not with some piece of software alone. So they have that precious feeling of belonging to the real classroom. Believe it or not, in the pandemic world people do miss this kind of experience.

Interaction and sharing motivate students to put more effort into learning as far as they see what other students achieve and how their progress goes on.

8. AI learning

In the eLearning world, there’s yet another game-changer, and it is AI, artificial intelligence. It is the thing, transforming eLearning and making it similar to the traditional educational approach. Having the capability to monitor and analyze the student’s progress, AI adapts the learning process at once. The easiest example is detecting the gaps in the student’s knowledge and supplying materials to fill the gap. But the students can still be active members of education, interacting with their AI-tutor using voice commands.

So, to sum up, the eLearning industry is growing fast and will continue to expand, cause it's an industry people desperately need right now. And when they come to you, you have to be ready to give them the best learning experience possible and to make them stay with you even when the lockdown is over. Using the mentioned points, you’ll get closer to this ambitious goal.

eLearning is a trend for the future and something that you'll want to watch closely! If you need help or have any questions, get in touch with us!