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And now, a rival that Skillsoft canвЂ™t acquire, has just got a stunning endorsement that can only be explained by one thing вЂ“ e-learning content thatвЂ™s better than anything else on the market. Its customers want cutting-edge alternatives. Its content library is still perceived as post-Gutenberg. The SumTotal purchase was perceived by industry analysts as a very smart move.ДЄnd the buzz will likely be positive about SkillsoftвЂ™s acquisition lastВ week of Vodeclic, a provider of microlearning modules to enhance digital skills.Д«ut Skillsoft is vulnerable. In 2014, Skillsoft bought a top learning management system, SumTotal, potentially solving one of the biggest problems in e-learning, the integration of content and a seamless delivery system. ItвЂ™s remarkably good at penetrating corporate learning departments, mapping its content to a companyвЂ™s learning competency grid, and inking blanket licensing deals well into the six figures. Bersin was more diplomatic than many corporate learning professionals IвЂ™ve spoken to when he said in October 2014, вЂњWhile Skillsoft has always been a market leader in revenue and market share, the company has not pushed the envelope in content and user experience innovation.вЂќ The dirty little secret about Skillsoft has been that its content is dated and, frankly, not very good. Like most monopolists, Skillsoft is not loved. Which is why a group led by private equity firm Berkshire Partners purchased it for $1.2 billion in 2010, and then Charterhouse Capital Partners bought it for $2 billion in 2014 (that was nearly five times revenue and 20 times earnings). Skillsoft has enjoyed near-monopoly power in corporate e-learning for years. Its strategy has been to buy up all serious rivals, most notably Element K in 2011 and Mindleaders in 2012. In 2012, the leading analyst in the talent development industry, Josh Bersin of Bersin by Deloitte, called Skillsoft an вЂњindispensable vendor.вЂќ At $450 million, it dwarfs all competitors. Now, you canвЂ™t talk about corporate e-learning without talking about Skillsoft, which even today dominates the corporate e-learning space. It needs to be a video that creates an experience for learners that mimics, and can compete against, the video style youвЂ™d find on YouTube. Only in the past five years has it become clear that if youвЂ™re going to вЂњvideo-izeвЂќ content (thatвЂ™s really what e-learning does), your point of departure needs to be that youвЂ™re creating a video, not a book. But no one realized it, and legacy instructional designers kept churning out 90-minute e-learning modules that were impossible to watch, not just for digital natives but for Gen-Xers and Boomers whose brains had been rewired. This was already true in the early 2000s. E-learning was trying to be linear, logical and complete, exactly what learners donвЂ™t want when theyвЂ™ve got a mouse in their hand. The problem with early e-learning was that instructional designers were creating digital content with their minds firmly anchored in the book era. According to Carr, as we increasingly gleaned knowledge online, we started craving information in вЂњshort, disjointed, overlapping bursts.вЂќ Our attention spans shrank.

#Best lynda courses for programmers tv

Unlike earlier visual media like TV and movies, the computer had the ability to convey the written word in a way that could compete with books. In the two decades after the digital age took hold in the mid-1990s, the legacy rules for content creation have been turned upside down. And it worked fine because our minds were conditioned to want information delivered that way. In Nicholas CarrвЂ™s book, вЂњ The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,вЂќ he called the period from the printing press until the age of the Internet the вЂњpost-Gutenberg era.вЂќ For centuries, content was produced to be linear, logical and complete вЂ“ like a book.

Something was horribly wrong with what e-learning content developers were doing. And those who did watched a program or two and quickly gave up. A study in 2004 showed that two-thirds of employees with paid access to 'voluntary' (i.e., usually soft-skills) e-learning never logged in.

#Best lynda courses for programmers code

Companies bought access to corporate e-learning libraries, but вЂњutilizationвЂќ вЂ“ industry code for вЂњIs anybody watching this stuff and actually learning?вЂќ вЂ“ was appallingly low. It will make email look like a rounding error.вЂќДidnвЂ™t happen.

John Chambers of Cisco once said that, вЂњE-learning is the next killer app. In 1999, investors poured $800 million into an industry that threatened to make live training obsolete (who needs humans?). During the tech boom in the late 1990s, e-learning was white hot.