Leading Links 2021 – Issue 9

It’s time for another round-up of resources to help you grow and improve your learning business. To kick things off, here are a couple of current and upcoming Leading Learning initiatives that may be of interest:

• The Virtual Conferences Report: We’ve released our 2021 edition and you can download it for free. (Many thanks to Digitell for sponsoring and making that possible!)
  
• The 2022 Learning Business Landscape: In our next Leading Learning Webinar, we’ll look back at key developments that impacted the learning business in 2021. We’ll also look ahead to what’s coming in 2022 and beyond. Thanks to Web Courseworks for sponsoring. 

Also, we’ll note that you can now access previous issues of Leading Links (starting with the December, 2020 edition). Be sure to check them out – there are bound to be valuable resources you missed or have forgotten about. 

Job Openings
Have an opening? Let us know and we’ll share it with our readership. Here’s one we know about:

• The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has an opening for Director of Program Development, Continuing Education. Find out more on the ASCE Web site >>

October Links
Here’s what we’ve rounded up for this month. 

[Strategy | Leadership] Who can compete with Big Learning?
In case you’ve missed it, Coursera went public earlier this year, and Udemy will soon. These are two of the biggest companies among a growing sector of large companies focusing on serving the burgeoning lifelong learning market. We noted long ago that traditional learning businesses can learn a lot from these types of companies. At the same time – as this article in Higher Ed Divesuggests – these companies are a significant source of competition, not just for traditional higher education but for all organizations that serve adult learners.

While the Higher Ed Dive article positions this – based on a recent book – as some sort of new “upheaval,” it strikes us as the natural continuation of dynamics that were highlighted in Leading the Learning Revolution and before. Regardless, to paraphrase a question posed in the article, all learning businesses need to be asking at this point “What can we offer that Big Learning can’t offer?” For many – maybe most – the answer may still be “A lot!,” but exactly “what” needs to be crystal clear and the follow-on question is “For how long, and how do we need to start evolving?“

[Portfolio] The coaching explosion
A blending of online coaching with other forms of online learning is one of the biggest trends we have seen emerge this year. Multiple edupreneurial course platforms (Podia, Kajabi, Teachable) have added or already had capabilities to support the scheduling and management of coaching sessions. In the corporate L&D market, Josh Bersin notes that there has been “explosive growth,” that “the coaching market has caught fire,” and, increasingly, it is moving toward being AI-driven. 

All of this jibes with a general shift towards a desire for more personal and personalized forms of online learning. Certainly a trend for learning businesses to tune into and explore as they are planning for 2022. 

[Technology] cmi5: Coming to an LMS near you soon?
Okay, we realize this is the type of stuff that makes non-techies’ eyes glaze over, but learning business professionals need to be aware that learntech standards are evolving. After many years, xAPI (aka Tin Can, aka The Experience API) seems to finally have gotten some traction as an approach to tracking a broad range of learning experiences, even ones that live outside an LMS. The problem is that xAPI was never really meant to track formal online courses the way that SCORM does, and the two specifications don’t really connect to each other. At least not without – you guessed it – cmi5. 

So what is cmi5? We’re glad you asked, and we’re glad that Alicia Pack at Rustici has provided An explanation of cmi5 in (mostly) plain English. We’ll also note that Rustici recently launched CATAPULT, a project with the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative to accelerate adoption of cmi5. So, it’s likely you’ll start hearing more about it in 2022.

And, now that you’ve got your tech hat on, we also highly recommend that you listen in to our interview with Sae Schatz, director of ADL, on The Future Learning Ecosystem. 


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That’s it for this edition. If you find Leading Links valuable, please share it with a colleague who may also find it valuable. (And, of course, they can get their own subscription here.)