The eLearning industry is continuing to experience rapid change and growth as new technology emerges and more organisations reach out for online learning support. IBISWorld values the online education market at $9.1 billion in 2023 after experiencing 7.4% year on year grown since 2018. In a post-pandemic workplace, the hybrid environment has an increasing need for mobile learning to keep employees upskilled—wherever they are. What are the eLearning trends to watch out for? For those in the learning and development or eLearning market, we’ve rounded up 5 of the trends to keep a close watch on for 2023.
1. Micro Learning (and micro credentials)
One of the greatest challenges facing employers is the ‘skills-gap’ and the need to upskill and retrain employees to retain them and reach strategic goals. The PWC Workforce of the Future study found three quarters of respondents are willing to take initiative in upskilling. Micro learning offers an emerging solution to the skills-gap problem by offering bite-sized online learning opportunities to gain capability in a specific subject area. That’s why micro learning is our number one pick for 2023 eLearning trends.
Micro learning gives people an opportunity to learn and earn micro-credentials in their new skillset. A well-designed micro credential offers a flexible, portable, and cost-effective upskilling solution that encourages lifelong learning culture and increases employee engagement. It aligns the business needs with the employees’ career aspirations, as each employee can forge their own learning path to meet their career goals.
Research from Dresden University of Technology in Germany studied the effectiveness of micro-learning against traditional large content learning and found the micro-learners answered 28% faster and retained 22% more information than the long-form learners. Micro-learning may be more effective because the use of bite-sized learning allows material to be processed from our short-term to long-term memory without getting mentally fatigued from excessive information.
2. Mobile Learning
Mobile learning is becoming increasingly prevalent in eLearning, as people want to complete their micro-learning when it suits them which might be on the go or commuting or exercising. The success of mobile learning depends on the functionality of your LMS to work on mobile. That’s why eWorks LMS uses Moodle learning platform to offer a seamless mobile learning experience across all devices.
The use of a dedicated mobile app helps ensure the best online learning experiences for your learners, and this is something we will be seeing much more of in 2023. Mobile apps allow participants to learn at their own pace and immerse themselves in their online education. If your content isn’t easily accessible across all mobile devices, it’s time to start looking for a new solution.
3. Video-based learning
As the saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words and a video can tell you even more. Video-based learning has surged in popularity in the past few years as organisations forced to work remotely (and choosing to stay that way) look for cost-effective training solutions.
Video-based learning dramatically decreases travel costs, offers increased consistency for the learning experience, and has the capacity to revolutionise how you deliver your training. An estimated 83% of people prefer watching videos for training over reading or listening to content.
Organisations have a huge opportunity to create and host videos within an LMS to deliver content like microlearning and enhance that information with interactive quizzes and reflection (more on interactive content below).
4. Gamification
As the world of eSports has grown, so too has the gamified online learning market. Gamification helps meet learning development and training needs through fun and engaging online learning experience. Being awarded points, badges, gifts, and other tokens as you progress through each learning module positively motivates participants to complete their training.
Gamification is far from a new concept (anyone else remember Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing?), the use of digital badges and rewards has been increasingly shown in research to enhance motivation, recognise skills that are often overlooked, validate informal learning and support self-reflection.
There is also a competitive element with gamification that may come from ‘streaks’ of how many days in a row you’ve logged in and completed content or an overall leader board where employees can battle for top spot. Gamification will be increasingly important for challenging content matter like compliance or industry regulations that need to be regularly updated.
5. Interactive Content
As our attention spans shorten, content must be interactive to drive engagement to drive online learning. This can post a challenge for learning and development teams, but with huge advances in technology, AI, VR and AR; interactive content will continue to be a growing eLearning trend for 2023.
Long gone are the days of reading a course handbook in a stuffy meeting room; interactive content offers ways to personalise content and help users find the right learning path for their online learning needs. Leading tertiary education institutions like Harvard Business School are already exploring virtual classrooms to create online learning environments where students and teachers can interact similarly to how they would face to face. This is a space that will continue to grow and transfer to the custom/executive education space as organisations look for new ways to engage and keep their people engaged in training.
People learn in a variety of ways, which is why an LMS offers different ways to engage with the content and boost long-term retention of information. Social learning (where participants can share their own experiences about the training material) helps foster an online learning community and promotes a culture of lifelong learning. Similarly, by asking your learners to share and create their own content, you are fostering deep learner engagement and helping to build and promote a lifelong learning culture.
Talk to the eLearning experts
Keeping up with eLearning trends can seem like a minefield, especially in such an agile and evolving industry. This is where having a dedicated team of experts in Learning and Development can make all the difference to your online education learning experience.
Want to learn more about how we can create the right eLearning solution for your team? Get in touch today:
