The Learned Man!

eLearningCareers.com

I received a note today from Pradip Sood of Pune, India who has started eLearningCareers.com, what would appear to be the first niche e-Learning job-board that I have come across. So far it has all kinds of jobs cutting across functions from e-Learning companies across India. The design is nice and fluid allowing you to search for jobs via 'function', 'company', 'city' and so on. They also have RSS feeds (essential if you ask me) and let you subscribe to receive job posts by e-mail for those of you who don't know what RSS is yet!

It's a great idea, has loads of potential and it would be interesting to see what they do with this and how it evolves.

 

Techbooks - Have Money, Will Buy?

Within a year of completing the takeover of Maximize Learning, Techbooks is on the prowl again eyeing acquisitions in India and the US. Techbooks is on the lookout for companies specialising in services such as content IT and litigation support or have customers in verticals including pharmaceutical and healthcare industry.

For organic growth, the company plans to invest $5-7 million this year to augment its capacity in India. For acquisition, Techbooks plans to consider companies with revenues of $10-20 million. Click here for more.

Techbooks' investors include American Capital & Blue Water Capital. Click here for their corporate snapshot with details of past acquisitions.

India Rising - One Billion Reasons To Care

Click here to see an interesting little video profiling the rise of India, despite all the hinderances and lack of infrastructure. Toward the end of the clip Thomas Friedman gives us his take on what the mood in India is right now. He says, "You want to know what India feels like, its really quite simple. Pull out a champagne bottle, shake it for an hour and uncork it. You wouldn't want to get in the way of that cork!". Well said Mr. Friedman!

Instructional Design Courses In India

In response to a lot of queries I have decided to provide some information on the courses available for budding instructional designers in India. If you know of a course that should be in here or if you represent an institution that offers courses in instructional design please feel free to email me at:

Symbiosis Centre For Distance Learning

Certificate Course in Instructional Design
(This course has been designed for e-learning, and covers script writing, story board creations, authoring, creating technical documentation, training & teaching.)

This course is offered twice in a Year (i.e. 15th January & 1st July)

Click here to write to the institute or click here for more details about this course.

S.N.D.T Women's University

SNDT has the Masters in Educational Technology with Computer Applications (METCA) course along with short term credit courses in Instructional Design.

You could contact them using the info here.

Get Smarter

Read 'The Learned Man! Blog' everday, take a shower with your eyes closed, brush your teeth with your wrong hand, all these activities can actually make you upto 40% smarter within 7 days, according to research done by a BBC programme.

The programme found that a combination of techniques based on healthy eating, physical activity, sound sleep and stimulating your mind through solving puzzles and remembering lists makes people sharper, more confident and better at making decisions.

Click here to read the entire article.

Huveaux's Strategy for Epic & Other UK Updates

Some six months after acquiring Epic, Huveaux has revealed its strategy for the future.

As anticipated Huveaux has placed a strong emphasis on products. The key parts of their statement to the City on 6th March 2006, were:

"From the outset, it has been our intention to extend Epic’s skill set and experience and expand its revenue base by altering the business model and building a portfolio of owned IP which can deliver an additional and recurring revenue stream over the longer term. Consequently, our strategy for Epic is to:

• Create a Huveaux-owned product portfolio combining Epic’s innovative e-learning techniques with our existing learning content. These products will be sold based on an annual user licence model. Our first chosen areas are Leadership, Compliance and Human Resources Legislation;
• Develop, through internal joint ventures, electronic versions of our existing product where they offer customers an extra benefit."

Other UK Updates:

• the Adval and Maxim (formerly Knowledgepool e-learning)  merger has been finalised and the old Brighton Knowledgepool office closed
• the announced Futuremedia and Ebc deal is due to go through later in March
• there have been some redundancies at Brighton based Brightwave

Source:
Kineo

Life Inside Googleplex

Ever wondered what the Google offices look like, and what it is to work in there.

"The Googleplex is the Google company headquarters, located in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, near San Francisco. The word Googleplex is a play on the word googolplex, and a portmanteau of Google and complex—googolplex being the name given to 10googol, or one followed by a googol zeros, and the headquarters comprising a complex of buildings. The building is unlike many modern company headquarters; contained within the sprawling complex are shade lamps, giant rubber balls, and other unusual niceties reminiscent of the dot-com boom. The complex is located along Charleston Road in north Mountain View close to the Shoreline Park wetlands." - Wikipedia

Inside Pics:

From Google: Googlers at work & play

From Time Magazine: Life in the Googleplex, Photo Essay

From Digg: Inside pics of Googleplex

eLearning China: Higher Ed

An article titled, 'On The Brink of Revolution' in The Guardian discusses the changing competitive landscape for British higher education. From the article:

"...China can't build campuses fast enough to keep up, so the problems of student support and pedagogy of online learning will have to be solved..."

"...China, followed by India, is going into the higher education business in a big way - as teachers as well as learners. The competition is no longer against American or Australian universities but increasingly with Chinese universities seeking to attract overseas students.

Although the report, English Next, focused mainly on teaching English, it had major implications for higher education delivered in English. David Graddol, an applied linguist, said China, which has traditionally been a major source of international students, was repositioning itself as a net exporter of higher education, poaching students from its Asian neighbours, such as India, Japan and Korea. China, says Graddol, will soon be able to offer cheaper degrees that are taught in English and come with the added incentive of Mandarin, a language that is becoming increasingly important to the international business community.

Singapore and Malaysia are also establishing themselves as "education hubs", says Graddol. The number of international students heading to the UK is already declining. Last year, four out of five universities reported a drop. The number of Chinese students, the largest single source, was also found to have fallen at some institutions by as much as 50%.

"Most UK universities have seen a recent fall-off in international student numbers. These students are not coming back, it's a long-term trend," says Graddol. "The number of students going into China is increasing. More have been going into China than have been coming out," he adds..."

Some recent numbers out of China:

By iResearch
The Chinese online education market is still in its infancy as reported in the recent 2004 China Online Education Research Report, by iResearch, a Chinese IT online market research provider.

The report mentioned that the Chinese online education market is worth RMB 14.4 billion (US$1.7 billion). As e-learning becomes more recognized with the popularity of Internet, its market scale is estimated to escalate to RMB 29.6 billion (US$3.6 billion) by 2007.

By Analysys International
China's total market size of Internet services (mobile value-added services excluded) reached RMB18 billion in 2005, representing an increase of 41% from 12.8 billion in 2004, in its recently released report China Internet Market Report 2005-2006.

According to the report, Analysys International classifies Internet services into three business models: contents, marketing services and intermediate services. Contents and marketing services are the major income source of China's Internet services market.

Contents services, represented by Internet games, instant messaging services, B2C and online education, reached RMB10.5 billion in 2005, accounting for 58% of the market total. Typical service providers include Shanda, Netease, The9, New Oriental, China Education Online (EOL) and Tencent.

From CERNET-Blackboard
CERNET-Blackboard, a marketing agency of online educational technology Blackboard, reported Tuesday the number of Blackboard clients in China had grown to 96 at the end of 2005.

"We are excited about the achievement as it was made in only two years," said Jiang Aiping, CERNET-Blackboard marketing manager. Current Blackboard clients in China are mainly colleges and universities, including the prestigious Renmin University of China, Beijing Normal University and Nanjing University.

The $100 Laptop

"Studies have shown that kids take up computers much more easily in the comfort of warm, well-lit rich country living rooms, but also in the slums and remote areas all around the developing world." -Nicholas Negroponte

And we know that Nicholas is right on the ball. Sugata Mitra with his 'Hole In The Wall' experiment confirmed the very same thing.

The $100 laptop is being developed by One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a Delaware-based, non-profit organization created by faculty members from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. OLPC is based on "constructionist" theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, as well as the principles expressed in Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital. The founding corporate members are Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat.

OLPC wants to distribute 100 millions of these laptops to underdeveloped countries where is not no network access and electricity. Technical breakthroughs have already driven the prototype design, but every technical breakthrough in the next five years would mean costs would continue to fall. These laptops would benefit primarily from mesh networking, as a way of sharing scarce net connections.

Although children will be able to interact with each other through the machines, education was still the priority for the laptops. But by using mesh networking, the vision is for children to interact while doing homework, and even share homework tips on a local community scale.

"Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education. So when we make this available, it is an education project, not a laptop project. The digital divide is a learning divide - digital is the means through which children learn leaning. This is, we believe, the way to do it." - Nicholas Negroponte

Endgadget has put up this pic which supposedly shows the 'winning designs' for these machines.

eLearning China: Enter The Dragon

The time seems to be right to discuss eLearning opportunities in China. Indian vendors are bound to want to test the waters and explore opportunities in this vast country. So what are the opportunities and why will Indian companies want to set up shop in China:

• Indian vendors may want to service their US and European clients who may be expanding operations into China
• Indian vendors may want to create a base in China and service geographies such as Japan, South Korea & Taiwan
• Indian vendors may want to take a shot at tapping the domestic markets in China.

William J. Rothwell, author of “Scaling the Great Wall: Training in China,” which appeared December 2004’s issue of Training Magazine, comments,

“Assuming that China’s market is the same as the U.S. and marketing approaches that work in the U.S. will work in China is a mistake. Chinese people are more trusting of people who can speak their language and understand their culture, though they have great respect for Western expertise.”

Here are few more comments from experts in the article,
“It is important that multinational companies get away from thinking that one approach fits all cultures. Such thinking remains a common ground for complaint in China” - Xaozhen (Jenny) Yan, Director Motorola University, China.

“Only those with an innovative business model, carefully segmented marketing and specific quality delivery will prosper.” - Nick Arnold, President of Leadership for Life and Campus International.

But those who do their homework will prosper as it is estimated that by 2005, the e-learning market in China is projected to be worth $37 million. (Source: Training Magazine.)

As Rothwell points out, the Chinese say,” You can get anything you want in China--as long as you are patient enough to wait.” But although patience might be a virtue; prior knowledge is always gold.

In 2003, China’s 1,552 colleges and universities enrolled 3.8 million students for bachelor degrees, and over 220,200 students for master degrees and 48,700 for doctoral degrees. The National university entrance rate reached 19% in 2004. The country’s 558 adult higher learning institutions, for those who did not enter college, enrolled in more than 1.59 million students to teach skills in the agricultural, industrial, educational, medical, health, financial, and public security sectors. According to China’s Ministry of Education, more will be done within the next few years to develop vocational and adult education programs, serve regional economic and social development, and promote on-the-job and re-employment training programs.

American universities are very active in promoting American education in China. As of April 2004, there are over 137 Ministry of Education approved joint programs with foreign institutions. The United States is the destination of choice for Chinese who want to enroll in an MBA program. However, high costs, long absences from home and visa concerns make this choice somewhat difficult. Many of the programs are U.S. MBA programs. Presently, the U.S. leads the market in providing joint venture MBA and EMBA programs in China, but competition from European, Canadian and Australian organizations is increasing.

Many experts believe that e-learning is ideal for China because it solves much of China’s education needs. With its limited education resources, China can use long distance learning to educate its 200 million elementary and high school students. To that end, in October 2000 China’s Ministry of Education launched the “All Schools Connected” project, which will equip all of China’s 550,871 K-12 schools with e-learning systems by 2010. The Ministry also encouraged 67 top universities to offer e-learning degrees to produce more talent for the country’s burgeoning economy. The nation’s very best high schools can also create Internet schools to train teachers and tutor students in far-flung regions. Private companies also heeded the e-learning call, many now offer vocational training and certification exam preparation online.

Sources:
Jedlet.com Journal
BuyUSA