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
