If you spend money on eLearning, you’ve got to do this….
A couple of weeks ago in Boston, the eLearning Guild’s new director of research, Steve Wexler, dogged me to see their new research tool. I turned him down: I didn’t go to Boston to see something I can look at here in Berkeley. Also, Steve was giving demos left and right, and I figured I’d get a better show when we had time to delve into things away from the carnival of the conference. I’ve been traveling ever since, so Steve hasn’t pinned me down yet.
This evening an email from the Guild arrived, touting its offerings, research among them. I clicked into something called My Reports. And I got hooked.
I zeroed in on Satisfaction with Products and Satisfaction with Services. The interface let me refine my searches. For example, I checked out LMS products. I moved a slider to eliminate ratings with ten or fewer responses. I looked at Overall Satisfaction and Cost/Benefit.
The responses confirmed something I’ve long suspected. Satisfaction with an LMS is usually inversely proportion to the vendor’s budget for advertising and promotion. In general, if a vendor is very prominent in the market, Guild members will be very dissatisfied with its products.
The research is based on rankings from eLearning Guild member questionnaires. It’s hardly a representative group. Nonetheless, some guidance is better than none. When twenty-five people give a product thumbs down, my crap detectors go up. That caution alone merits joining the Guild for $99 to access the research
. The more you pay, the more you get, but the bare-bones version was enough to get me excited.
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8 comments ↓
What! No links?
Karyn
Excellent question
Here’s a link to the eLearning Guild Research Archive
http://www.elearningguild.com/research/archives/index.cfm?action=view&frompage=1&StartRow=1&MaxRows=40
I was hoping to give people an opportunity to practice using Google.
And I was in a hurry.
jay
P.S.
Thanks, Joe.
Very interesting Jay. I’ll try and take a look at this. One question - Do you think dissatisfaction with big budget LMS vendors is reflected in purchasing decisions? The big LMS vendors seem to have a large chunk of the Fortune 500s as clients and seem to believe life is peachy. Are they wrong?
Cheerio
Rishi
Without commenting on the elearning Guild offering…
> some guidance is better than none
This is only true if the guidance is reliable. If it is not reliable - and an unrepresentative sample is not reliable - then some guidance is frequently worse than none.
If you ask software vendors for advice on which OS to buy, they will recommend Windows because that’s what their products run on (no so many software vendors selling open source). So you go out and buy Windows. Now you are worse off - you are paying for Windows and paying those vendors for stuff you could have obtained for free in open source.
E-learning Guild members are vendors. Some are very nice, others are very knowledgeable, many are both. But they’re vendors. They are not disinterested.
Stephen, most of the membership of the Guild are practitioners, not vendors. I agree that one must be cautious using a resource like the Guild’s, but I find value in knowing that most users of ____ (insert well-known company name) think it’s inferior. As I said, it raises my crap detectors. It makes me ask questions I may not asked otherwise. You may not need an alert like this, but I sense that many harried corporate decision-makers do. You and I have split this hair before: this is not an either/or situation; it’s shades-of-gray.
jay
Stephen and Jay,
Indeed most of the Guild members are NOT practitioners; fewer than 17% fall into the e-Learning tools and service provider category.
And for the 1,000 members that completed the survey on LMS, only 10% are in the e-Learning tool and service industry. Stephen, if you don’t want to hear what vendors have to say, just filter out their results.
Indeed, one of the critical features of our direct data access is that your can filter the results by industry, company size, number of learners impacted, age, gender, etc. I think of it as having the ability to filter out people who voted for Sanjaya.
But just remember, when I use the direct data access capability myself I reserve the right to filter out results from academics from Canada.
Steve Wexler
Director of Research and Emerging Technology
The eLearning Guild
PS Actually, we have not yet added the ability to filter tool use and satisfaction by country, but we will do it shortly. But we can filter out academics, directors, managers, supervisors, etc.
Rishi, no, I don’t think customer dissatisfaction is reflected in LMS vendors’ revenues, at least not much. The reason vendors pay sales people, marketing departments, advertising, publicity, etc., is often to make something seem what it is not.
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