Investing in Workplace Cloud Learning Technologies

By 2025...

Global eLearning Market
$
0
billion
Corporate eLearning Market
$
0
billion
Compound Annual Growth Rate
0
%

sources

First Research
Valuates Reports

What's spurring growth ?

Demand for highly engaging and interactive mobile microlearning experiences will usher in a new era for workplace learning. To facilitate this shift, designing, authoring and hosting of most self-paced corporate online learning will be cloud based by 2025.

Cloud deployments are increasingly used to manage data (Bond Capital, First Research) and IBISWorld forecasts the data processing & hosting services as well as software publishing industries in Canada to demonstrate growth from now to 2025:

“Software publishers and technology companies increasingly moved toward cloud computing over the past five years, in which storage and computing tasks are handled by networked machines, often servers in a data centre owned by the service provider rather than at the point of consumption.

This technology has greatly expanded software capabilities on platforms that were previously limited by hardware sizes, particularly cell phones, and makes sharing and accessing files easier and more convenient. This trend is expected to continue over the next five years.

source

IBIS world

“Reducing employee training costs has been instrumental in driving the growth of the corporate e-learning market size.

…

The adoption of microlearning for employee training is expected to fuel the corporate e-learning market size.

source

Valuates reports

“Cloud deployed EdTech to record the fastest growth rate during the forecast period.

…

This deployment type is preferred for its features, such as better and enhanced security, lower setup costs, easy accessibility, quicker deployment, highly scalable, customizable, enhanced storage space, ease of maintenance, automatic upgrade of course materials, and automatic licensing done by vendors.

source

Markets and Markets

What are the Canadian business opportunities?

1

Infrastructure

eg: Further develop Canadian led cloud infrastructure and ecosystem

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Opportunity

The transition to digital adoption and remote working for many companies has been accelerated in 2020 by the global pandemic, COVID-19. The rise of remote work has put additional pressure on internal company IT departments to have secure yet very fast IT infrastructure that can be easily accessed from anywhere. Cloud based solutions will be needed to help facilitate this transition. With growing geopolitical tension and animosity towards US tech, Canadian companies are well positioned to provide leadership in Canadian and international solutions to these problems if we can attract and retain talent to build and operate growing cloud infrastructure in Canada and abroad. While the Canadian market is relatively small, the growing European and Asian elearning markets offer high growth potential for Canadian vendors. 

According to IBIS World's Industry Report on Data Processing & Hosting Services in Canada, "Industry revenue is projected to grow at an annualized rate of 3.2% to $7.3 billion over the five years to 2025."

 

2

Software

eg: Software as a Service, Saas companies; Develop integrated LMS/LXP and authoring software with Canadian servers, think Absorb LMS x Articulate Rise.com

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Opportunity

Currently, cloud based course authoring tools like Rise.com are less robust than desktop counterparts like Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate, trading off the high degree of interactivity customization for responsiveness, efficiency, stability, and ease of use. This will rapidly change. Many education and elearning companies have been slow to act on changing technology, in some cases still relying on outdated tech like Flash. Meanwhile, cloud technology and modern Javascript frameworks like REACT, Angular and Gatsby have become lightning fast and have revolutionized the capabilities of web apps outputting HTML5 content (for example, Construct 3 is an entirely web-based, extremely capable game development tool). It is easy to imagine web apps such as this adding Javascript protocol tracking functions such as SCORM and xAPI in premium Education and Training licenses to be competitive as stand-alone course authoring software. 

3

Design

eg: Create and host fast, rich media, interactive digital learning content

More

Opportunity

Mobile learning (mLearning) and microlearning experiences will require high definition streaming of multimedia content to any device. This will enable trends of on-demand and “in-the-flow” of work (Docebo, The State of Online Learning for Enterprises) learning. This flow of data will be facilitated through 5G networks and cloud technology. Design and implementation of these learning experiences will rely on the cloud based software previously described along with high quality audio, video, animation, and relevant social gamification elements where appropriate. This opens up opportunities for boutique designers and content developers to focus on market niches and specializations like audio, video, interaction design, game mechanics, AR, VR, instructional design or others. Large scale, slower to move learning departments still relying mostly on face to face, virtual instructor led training, or PowerPoint elearning materials will continue the trend of digitization of their materials, processes and implementation of hybrid and blended learning models.

4

Consulting

eg: Provide specialized cloud learning consulting services, data migration, change management

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Opportunity

Cloud learning consulting businesses will be able to specialize in any or all of the aforementioned areas. According to World Economic Forum, 27% of North American companies will use private training providers to reskill or upskill their workforce between 2018 and 2022. Cloud technology will enable teams of HR departments and outside consultants or internal Learning & Development groups to collaborate in real time on projects within cloud based project management tools like Basecamp, or fully integrated cloud based interactive authoring and learning management systems.

TLDR: The future of learning is in the cloud. Data storage and analysis is the at the core of digital learning and will become increasingly important over the next five years. Cloud solutions are increasing the speed and effectiveness of learning data in all aspects from LMSs to course development. 

Thanks for reading, I hope this report has been insightful for you or provided some inspiration for your own venture.

If you’re wondering who I am, my name is Ryan and I’m an Educational Venture Analyst in the Fall 2020 Ventures in Learning Technology cohort. I live and play in Vancouver, Canada and have been developing corporate and non-profit learning and knowledge solutions since 2013.

Feel free to get in touch, I’m always happy to talk shop!

Ryan James

Learning Consultant