When talking about e-learning 2.0 it is impossible to get away from the long tail. If you have not heard this term before there is a detailed explanation over at the longtail.com.
The long tail concept implies that consumption or productions models no longer follow a lowest common denominator approach. Marketers have seen huge reductions in costs and therefore no longer have to target such wide groups, there is a move toward targeting a larger number of niche markets at the lower end of the curve.
The concept is a long established in mathematics as the 80/20 principle. The 80/20 principle is not a hard and fast rule for all circumstances. In some cases 95/5 may be more realistic.
There are business examples such as 20 percent of employees are responsible for 80 percent of a company’s output or 20 percent of customers are responsible for 80 percent of the revenues.
In a knowledge based economy the skilled work force is seeing a paradigm shift from making things towards knowing things. It is become impossible to know every piece of information but more important to know how to find it.
How will this paradigm shift along with the long tail effect shape e-learning 2.0 going forwards? Millennials also called generation Y, is the generation following Generation X, especially people born in western culture from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. These learners will expect shorter bursts of multimedia rich information to cater for there reduced attention spans.
With the increased availability of rapid development tools and ever increasing usage of social media tools by said generation Y. Are we moving toward an e-learnming future where the top 20% of training material is produced by developers and SME’s and the other 80% is made up of courses made up of learnlets created using rapid development and web 2.0 tools? for example what better use of RSS feed technlogies than to ensure e-learning is dynamic and remains relevant?
