Tracking year to year changes in the elearning industry

The 2010 edition of Elearning Magazine!'s annual Fact Book and Buyers' Guide was published last week, and includes the results of the magazine's annual web-based survey on trends in e-learning and other training delivery modes.

Here's a round up of some the results that we found most interesting.

Of the 740 respondents, a whopping 93% reported that they use e-learning as part of their training program.

Respondents' e-learning budgets didn't seem to get slashed between the 2009 and 2010 surveys. In fact, the total budget allocations reported by all enterprise respondents actually increased by 30%. Government respondents reported no change in their e-learning budgets.

What is being trained changed between 2009 and 2010. Compliance training was the top priority for both enterprise and government respondents in 2009, and remained first for enterprise and second for government respondents in 2010. What is interesting that for both sets of respondents, customer service moved quite higher up in the priority rankings, going from fifth for both sets of respondents in 2009 to first for government and second for enterprise respondents in 2010.

Surprisingly, mobile learning is being used more among government respondents than enterprise respondents. Almost a quarter of government respondents – 24% - said they used mobile learning tools, compared to only 18% of enterprise respondents. Mobile learning tools are on the planning list for 37% of enterprise respondents and 35% of government respondents.

We received the print copy of the Fact Book and Buyer's Guide edition in the mail last week. The print article notes that the complete survey results are available in the Resources section of the magazine's website. Registration is required to access the reports.

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.