Making the numbers
While analyst company IDC has been forced to release a downward revision of its initial predictions of growth in the e-learning sector, Cindy Sim, IT services research analyst for IDC in Asia, says the sector is still set for a compound annual growth rate of 28 percent during the next four years, with the bulk of the growth predicted to take place towards the end of the period.
"From an overall Asia Pac point of view, I see the largest growth happening in 2005, from now until then I really do not expect sudden spurts of growth," Sim said.
However some vendors are more enthusiastic. Damian Hass, manager for Lotus e-learning at IBM Australia, says the sector is already growing rapidly and is on the verge of "explosive growth".
"Enterprises are very focused on using it as a tool to improve their performance," Hass said. "It is a major cost reduction factor for many organisations."
However, growth and stability appear uncorrelated in a market which has seen significant consolidation, as many of larger vendors muscle their way into an attractive market space.
Frank Cselko, senior director of education with Oracle, describes e-learning as the last of the cottage industries, saying it was traditionally based on a large number of small developers or consultancies capable of providing specific, if limited, service.
"For a lot of the smaller companies, the cost of development these days is such that it will send you broke," Cselko says, reeling off a series of developers and integrators which have scaled back their Australian operations. "To some degree, the dot-com wave caught up with the sector, but on the other hand a lot of these organisations lack the standards which the industry requires."
According to Cselko, corporate e-learning consumers are increasingly wary of installing software which they later discover to be difficult to integrate with other systems.
The concern regarding integration is largely derived from the fact that e-learning systems are increasingly integrated into HR and ERP systems within companies.
Tania Wickman, business development manager for Internet Software developers Web Raven, says that the ability to keep track of an employee's usage and results enabled employers and managers to earmark people for promotion based on their performance.
"Compliance and tracking is a big issues at the moment. When there is a legal requirement that all staff have a certain type of qualification, or are aware of a particular piece of legislation, suddenly the 'old school' of management sit up and start taking e-learning seriously," Wickman says. "Not only can online management deliver the required content in a creative way, it can carry out the assessments and record the results."
Cselko says that the level of integration is such that employees may not even realise they are in an e-learning environment because of the way didactic software can be integrated into standard company computer systems.
"The systems is just integrated into the way they work in the office, so that people are receiving new information while they work," Cselko said. "We use an approach like this in our sales centre."
