Towards Maturity

5 Learning technologies
tools is more than 20 years’ old and the high percentage not familiar with the term indicates
that this is a style of application that is likely to be of less interest to most people; certainly
one that is not talked about in literature to any significant extent. By contrast on-line books or
job aids are known about by 98%. It would appear that the simpler electronic job aid is likely
to be more popular than EPSS.
Respondents are asked about study support and helping learners consolidate their learning;
in these questions they were asked if they used electronic help and job aids (17%) and online
web reference materials (27%). These latter figures are more in line with the 20% of
respondents who currently use EPSS. On the other hand both rapid application and open
source tools are relatively new and have reached a stage where approximately 4 out of 5
respondents were familiar with these terms. It is less of a surprise that only 4 out of 5
understand the term Competency Management System. Although this has been available
as a concept for 15 years it is perhaps more the province of HR managers than learning and
development managers. Competency management does show one of the largest growth
rates in comparison to its current usage. Almost as many respondents will plan to implement
competency management by 2010 as are currently using it.
The high percentage of users who are not aware of e-portfolios and the low probability of
them being used is disappointing bearing in mind the importance these are likely to assume
in the education system. Only 3 out of 4 respondents recognise the term and of those only
one-third actually deploy e-portfolios.
The lead position occupied by Learning Management Systems is reflected in all the
segmentation analysis used in this study and is perhaps related to the importance of
administration and compliance reporting as drivers and benefits of e-learning. When
structuring the questions the category labelled content management systems actually said
“Content Management Systems (CMS, VLE)”. A Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) 3 has
some similarities with a virtual classroom. Students are able to communicate synchronously
or asynchronously with each other and with their tutors. Tutors can prepare and store
content for access by students. This may be a category that respondents have interpreted in
a variety of different ways. Differences have been noted between responses in the
education sector and others; reported in more detail elsewhere. Unfortunately we cannot
determine how many respondents considered this choice as a development tool or as a
collaborative learning tool. If the latter this follows a pattern of collaborative learning tools
being an area of expansion from a user base of approximately 25%. Collaborative tools are:
video conferencing, virtual classroom, chat rooms (both moderated and unmoderated),
blogs/wikis and virtual learning environments (content management systems). Collectively
they are in the bottom half of the figure reported previously and least likely to be in use, or
planned.
3 Wikipedia: Components of these systems usually include templates for content pages, discussion forums, chat,
quizzes and exercises such as multiple-choice, true/false and one-word-answer. Teachers fill in these templates and
then release them for learners to use. New features in these systems include blogs and RSS. Services generally
provided include access control, provision of e-learning content, communication tools, and administration of the
user groups.
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