Archive for nano-learning

Happy Halloween!

October 31, 2006 at 3:35 pm · Filed under General, News, nano-learning

I’d like to wish you a Happy Halloween! To help you have fun and stay safe, one of our users created some NanoLearning on safe Trick-or-Treating with your family. Click here to view it.

We have the capability to embed NanoLearning inline with a blog entry, and I would have done it here. However, WordPress does not allow their users to embed Flash into blog entries. That happens to be one of my personal “pet peeves” about WordPress, and most likely one of the reasons for us switching blogging platforms pretty soon. On the page with the NanoLearning title and description, you will see a link titled “Blog this” where you can create a blog entry that links to a piece of NanoLearning, or embed’s the NanoLearning directly into the blog entry.

You may have also noticed some changes on the Explore tab. Instead of giving you a big list of NanoLearning things we’re showing you the Top 10 most popular NanoLearning objects. Any NanoLearning can still always be accessed via it’s URL, or you can type part of it’s name in the “Search” box just like Google.

From the Explore menu, there is a submenu named Advanced Search. You can use that to search even the content of a piece of NanoLearning. So if you can’t remember the title or description, but you know it mentioned the planets, then search the content for “planet” and you will find it.

I know it sounds simple to be able to search in the content of a piece of any learning, but actually it isn’t. Most learning is built in Flash, and seach engines like Google can’t dig into the textual content of a Flash movie. Luckily we have designed our system in a way that lets you search learning content, and lets Google index NanoLearning content.

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Ambient Insight Report

October 25, 2006 at 8:22 pm · Filed under General, nano-learning, peer production

NanoLearning was recently mentioned in an industry report from Ambient Insight on the state of the e-learning industry. You can find details about the report here including a free executive summary. You can purchase the report directly from the website. To quote from the overview:

It is a new industry and the old rules do not apply. The market now favors innovative “disruptor” suppliers that are skilled at meeting the needs of the new buyers.

The report talks about how the relatively high cost to create rich self-paced e-learning content is an inhibitor to growth in the market. Most analyst estimates place the cost of developing engaging interactive e-learning courses at $25,000 – $50,000 per learning hour. We believe that revolution happens not when costs decrease 25% or even 50%, but by 2-3 orders of magnitude. The personal computer revolution was fueled by dropping the costs of owning a computer from $250,000 to $2,500. The cost to produce video has gone from $1,000 per minute to $500 for unlimited minutes, and that is driving the personal video craze at websites like YouTube and Revver.

Even if only 10 people in the world care to watch a video of me lipsynching to Shakira, if the production costs are almost zero the price is right. If nothing else, Web 2.0 is about ultra specialization.

NanoLearning is doing the same thing with interactive self-paced learning by providing free tools and infrastructure, and a business model that charges for premium services (becoming known as the “freemium” business model).  When you add to that the trend toward user-generated content, along with feedback/ratings and social aspects of learning you get powerful results.

We don’t release statistics, but I will tell you that over half of our users are from outside the United States. They tell us that the e-learning revolution never really happened in their countries because most businesses could not afford to buy six-figure LMS software or spend large amounts on content creation. That is true of small and medium sized businesses in the United States as well.

If people are starting to label NanoLearning as a market disruptor, then we are starting to make some progress.

Technorati tags: NanoLearning, nano-learning, microlearning, freemium, disruptors

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