E-learning In Italy Needs To Run

E-learning In Italy Needs To Run

The great nineteenth century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that "All truth passes through three stages.

1. First is ridiculed.
2. Then meets a violent opposition.
3. Finally, it is accepted as obvious."

Which phase is e-learning experiencing? Wait. In Italy or in the World? Well, not exactly the same thing. However, we can evaluate both cases. We could start from the rest of the world, and then see where we're in common and where we step into the Stone Age. Or worse.

$53 billion, this is the World market value of e-learning in 2010. Most of this business takes place in the U.S. and some European countries like Britain and Germany. Here we are in the third stage, the abvious acceptance of a technology that saves time and money. So much time and money. Moreover, why not giving proper attention to a sector that may be appropriate in virtually all professional fields and in recent years, thanks to advances in technology, is clearly growing?

In these countries all productive sectors are making elearning to earn significant cost savings, which becomes even greater when they organize training at home. In fact, with software such as Articulate Studio suite, you can create high impact graphics and interactive courses without being a programmer. This has encouraged the development of small e-learning teams, often made even by only one person, creating ad hoc courses for the companies where they work to enjoy customers and company employees themselves.

The advent and widespread diffusion of portable devices such as the l’iPad, a tablet from Apple, has also encouraged the growth of a new market: mobile learning. It is enough to see that the house of Cupertino dedicated a beautiful page of its site based on learning via iPad and the new frontiers that this tool opens. In this regard, see also the article - iPad 2 is here. E-learning: Now everything changes? - a more from this blog.

And where are we?

In my opinion we are divided between the second and third phases. The first, fortunately, at least in large part seems to be gone. It 's true, e-learning in Italy was taken on the wrong foot. Probably the elearning machine had to deal with four typical obstacles of the “Bel Paese”:

• An aversion rooted in popular culture related to new technologies
• The lack of appropriate technological infrastructure
• The habit of giving rise to the projects at the university level by penalizing the dissemination and field-testing by companies
• Thinking to solve in a flash all the problems related to the costs of training

Thus, in many cases e-learning in Italy was first ridiculed, then gnawed (too fast and in the wrong way) and finally abandoned. It has been rejected. How many times have we heard to say:

• "Yes, I tried it, but does not work" or
• "We had a lot of problems with e-learning" or
• "We started, but the person to deal with no longer works here or abandoned the project".

When we began to hear about e-learning many companies do not even know what it was (well, if you think about this, perhaps - unfortunately - things have not changed so much). Too often, even today, the eyes you look at of many (too many) Italian managers when you talk about e-learning are the eyes of an Italy still doubtful on the legs, which has difficulty on walking, and more on run. Yet e-learning would be a nice Gatorade for many businesses.

We have (re)discovered America. Welcome Italy 2.0!

From a few years now, thanks to the fact that several multinational companies in our country have accepted and exported e-learning as a training tool rooted in its structure, enhancing and publicizing the gifts, our managers have begun to take courage and invest in the sector. Many entrepreneurs said "If Kraft and Pfizer do it successfully, I can also do it!". In Italy (fortunately or unfortunately?) Something is always present: the spirit of emulation.

That's why we can say that we (re)discovered America. No, not the America of Colombo, but the one of Kuhlmann. Tom Kuhlmann is probably the world's leading expert in the field of elearning. It is certainly the most popular due to its blog Rapid eLearning that has recently passed the 75,000 readers.

Tom, with the help of the E-learning Heroes community, echoes a lot of developers around the planet who want to find the quickest and cheapest way to produce high quality e-learning courses. More and more developers follow his advice, and e-learning, even in Italy, is abandoning the production of costly and cumbersome courses in favor of new 2.0 standards.

The future is on our side

As often happened in our national history, we started off on the wrong foot and then we started running. Italy has all the means at its disposal to start racing in this area, and a great incentive comes from the fact that investments made in e-learning have a better profit margin and a high percentage of success.

The future is on our side, because new technologies never cease to make their appearance. Now is the turn of the Social networks. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn over all. Today we share, upload, edit, comment, advertise, review it. And in this moment of sharing is a great family that makes the rules: the one of Social networks.

So, you who are reading, you developer, you entrepreneur, you manager, you employee, all of us stand up and make ourselves one question: Where did I leave the sneakers, the last time? I want to run.

mosaicoelearning

Did you enjoy this article? If so, share it with your colleagues!