Sims Learning Connections

Borrowing Tom‘s question summary: With demands increasing for shorter, lower cost, high quality content delivered whenever and wherever I want, what should people who create classroom and/or off-the-shelf content do?

First, to paraphrase what others have already said, relative to what I also see as one potentially viable direction:

• Improve the quality
• Shift the “what business are we in?” answer from ‘delivering training’ to ‘facilitating performance improvement’
• Otherwise extend the offering

Or, to summarize and further paraphrase: offer a premium service and product that commands a premium price, versus a race to the bottom with a low-quality commoditized product that is competing with increasingly available free content.

I posit, knowingly without doing the real market analysis and hard work of finding the exact business model, the existence of another and very different but viable direction for a vendor is to embrace a mixed-source business model parallel to the revolution occurring with Open Source software. Here, the vendor would provide less of their value-add in the actual content and content development and more in creating an ecosystem of content developers, some that are employees of the vendor, others who are not.

Although I believe Tom Haskins is a bit ahead of reality in his first clean corpse reply, I think his more actionable second reply gets at some of the same with:

Market innovation and co-creation: Once there is a critical mass of free agents available to create innovative instructional designs, new support systems and aggregations of their ID offerings will emerge. Networks will reciprocate with a vast number of small providers like Walmart does with manufacturers, Microsoft does with .NET programmers and eBay does with sellers. Each developer of educational value will be listed, searchable and ranked like blogs, shareware and digital content.

There is a business in there somewhere with an “owning of the network.”

Side Note: Other than my current employment, part of what prompted the above “mixed source” thought was listening earlier this week to Charles Leadbeater on TEDTalks: The rise of the amateur professional. Highly recommended.