The Learned Man!

Moodle!

Results of the eLearning Guild's LMS Survey:

(For this report, LMS market share ratings were based on data from more than 2,300 respondents and satisfaction ratings were based on data from more than 1,200 respondents. In addition, the guild surveyed over 930 e-Learning professionals who represented more than 840 different organizations to definitively show just what the state of the industry is when it comes to Learning Management Systems.)

• The cost per learner to acquire, configure, and customize an LMS for large corporations ranges from $15.11 to $57.02.
• Skillsoft enjoys greatest overall satisfaction in large corporations with a large number of learners impacted (greater than 5,000 employees and learners).
• 29.58% of survey respondents plan to upgrade their LMS and 10.69% plan to abandon their current LMS and move to a different vendor.
• Moodle (yes, Moodle) enjoys both the largest market share and satisfaction in smaller corporations with a smaller number of learners impacted (fewer than 5,000 employees and learners).
• 11% of survey respondents indicate that they have not received a return on investment from their investment in a Learning Management System.
• SumTotal is the market share leader in large corporations with a large number of learners impacted (greater than 5,000 employees and learners).
• 21% of survey respondents use more than one LMS.
• SAP and KnowledgeImpact enjoy the largest percent of users that report a good return on investment.

Also see:
Kineo's view
Open Source LMS Comparison

Are e-Learning Employees Humans?

Asim Chowdhury continues to enlighten and regale us with his somewhat caustic style of writing. His articles, I am sure, have managed to stike a chord with loads of eLearning folks and even if they haven't you wont be left without a smile! Asim probably would make the perfect 'union leader' in an eLearning company.

Sample these:

Of Project Managers And Staged Shows
The 8 Hour Shift That Never Is
Are e-Learning Employees Getting A Raw Deal?

NIIT Bullish On eLearning

India's NIIT Ltd. (500304.BY) is planning to invest between INR250 million and INR400 million on expanding its infrastructure over the next two years ending March 31, 2009, the company's chief executive officer said.

"This year we invested about INR600 million on new infrastructure. But this year was a major renewal year with new partnerships requiring massive investments in infrastructure," Vijay K. Thadani told Dow Jones Newswires in a recent interview.

Part of this year's revenue will come from NIIT's acquisition of Element K, a U.S.-based provider of learning software, in August, 2006, said Thadani.

The acquisition has already added to the earnings per share in the very first quarter from October to December, he said. " We will have only seven months of their revenues (for the current fiscal year)."

He expects Element K to contribute about $57 million-$58 million to NIIT's total revenue in the current fiscal year.

The company's total revenue grew 20% on year to INR3.47 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2006, from INR2.89 billion in fiscal 2005, according to data on the Bombay Stock Exchange website.

Thadani expects NIIT's operating profit to "expand faster than the growth in revenue, maybe a couple of percentage points" in the current fiscal year.

He expects the main growth drivers to be the expanding knowledge economy in India and the rise in the outsourcing of training courses by developed economies.

"The growth of the knowledge economy is causing other new service sectors to come up, apart from IT," he said.

He added that the growth in the outsourcing of training courses is "beginning to gain a momentum which is akin to that of the software services and the BPO industry that we saw earlier."

In the coming fiscal year starting April 1, NIIT will look to expand in three areas - banking and financial services, retail and in general, the services industry, Thadani said.

"We will also look to grow inorganically as well if we don't have the competence in one area," he said, without elaborating.

(By Romit Guha | Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES)

Sify Reports Big eLearning Wins

SIFY Reports U.S. GAAP Results for the year and fourth Quarter ended 31st March 2007

International Business:

Sify continued its thrust in expanding its international business, led by two lines of service; Remote Infrastructure Management and Corporate eLearning Services. Both lines of business are seeing excellent customer traction and several important wins in the last quarter:

-- Sify has been chosen by a California based market research company focused on the wireless space to remotely manage their IT infrastructure

-- Sify has been chosen by a global consumer products company headquartered in UK to remotely manage their server infrastructure. Sify will be delivering these services from its global management center in Chennai

-- Sify has been selected as the preferred eLearning services partner by one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, for whom Sify is already providing eLearning content development as well as remote infrastructure support for their learning technology platforms. Sify expects this engagement to scale to $3-4 Million per year in the next 12-18 months

-- Sify has been awarded substantial repeat orders from a global leader in computer software, to provide eLearning courseware for several of their current and forthcoming products. This relationship is expected to yield $3-4 Million in revenues in 2007-08

-- Sify has been chosen as the learning services provider by a global leader in aero energy to provide a range of learning services including learning strategy design and content development. Sify has already completed the design phase and will now be developing a range of eLearning courses over the next 2 years, valued at over $3.0 Million.

As part of its international expansion, Sify has opened new sales offices in London and Dubai. This is in addition to its two existing offices in California and New Jersey, USA.

Open Source LMS Comparison

Starting a new post to capture resources providing comparison, information on Open Source LMS:

Course Management Systems Comparison - By Edutools
2006: The Year Of Moodle - From Epic
Open Source For Learning - Harold Jarche

RSS In Plain English

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

From - commoncraft

Through Their Eyes: India Based Training Suppliers Are Leading The Global Sourcing Charge

You can count on us to bring you the latest insights and moves from within the Indian content development industry.

From time to time though, its always a good idea, to see how this industry is being perceived by western media. Check out this story by Paul Harris for a Training & Development newsletter on the Indian eLearning Industry. (Pages 16-18).

In Paul's words: "And while Indian firms are clearly not the only offshore providers of such knowledge-based services, their prominence is unmatched."

Careless Whispers Redux

Before you continue reading you might want to check out the wikipedia entry on Gossip!

We have been hearing persistent rumours of a Pune based eLearning vendor (who has been burning up the PR lines with spiel on their authoring products) in talks to be bought out....if anyone knows more feel free to mail in....and please do mention "Gossip" in the subject line. :)

UPDATE: We hear that the company in question has indeed been bought out by a BPO. We estimate the deal size to be in the region of $25 Mn. Nothing official has been put out by any of the parties concerned yet.

Size Does Matter

Check out recent interviews, from Digital Learning, with Hurix CEO Subrat Mohanty and Brainvisa CEO Supam Maheshwari.

The thing about these CEO interviews is the predictability of answers provided. This may also have to do with the kind of questions asked. Everybody ends up plugging their company or a product, dishing out top level gyaan and vague numbers on the size of the markets. I hope we get to see some real interviews this year!

The only question however, where I felt these gentlemen came close to speaking their hearts was the one on critical roadblocks. Here are the responses for that one.

Q: What have been the critical roadblocks for you ?

Supam Maheshwari, CEO-Brainvisa: "Building deeper, integrated partnership with clients take enormous amounts of time in the industry. Our most critical and the biggest road block has been to try to reduce this time-frame. We can work with a client on any spoke of this wheel to begin with, and would like to transition it towards completing all spokes of this wheel and meet our objective of building a long term partnership."

Subrat Mohanty, CEO-Hurix: "Size. Very often we think and act like a company more than ten times our size. As a result, we end up competing against much larger entities both for business as well as talent. In these situations, our size sometimes acts as a roadblock."

Shift Happens

TATA Interactive's Jon Revelos brought this great video to my attention via his post Shift Happens

clipped from www.youtube.com