Market Differences in eLearning

I'm a fan of the number 42. So it seems significant that my post The Value of Instructional Designers just got its 42nd comment. Amazing how a post from a year ago can still generate conversation!

Sreya Dutta (Instructional Design: On the road to learning) responded to a thread in the comments about the eLearning market in India:

Cammy, thanks for this interesting post. I agree with Rupa and Poonam on the elearning industry in India but there are variations too. But I know of few variable cases too:

1. I know of companies who only hire instructional designers and buy Rapid elearning tools and expect the ID to do it all themselves to reduce the cost and over head of hiring graphic designers as well. One of the reasons is also that Graphic Designers often may not have much work, as sometime people just want ILT, or a few recorded sessions, other other delivery formats like remote training, that do no require heavy graphic or programming work.

2. Large MNC companies like IBM Deloitte (in India), sometimes just hire IDs and outsource the graphics/development work to elearning companies who have specialized graphics and development teams.

3. Microsoft in India, just hires content development managers, whose core skill sets is ID, but their role turns out to be that of a vendor manager and content reviewer, as Microsoft (in India) outsources elearning work to 3rd parties.

4. Oracle has Oracle University that provides services or graphics, editing and publishing to the other Business Units who need this for a price, but several times the BUs choose to have only IDs who would be required to create their own content, whether ILT, elearning, demos, etc using rapid development tools, to optimize the cost and get maximum output. Here IDs sometimes work as technical writers and TW sometimes write courses to optimize the cost. I was wanting to bring this up as a discussion in my blog sometime.

I hope this gives you a picture that once multi-nationals have entered they have changed the way in which companies work on elearning.

Is what Sreya sees going on in the Indian eLearning market any different than what you're seeing in your market? What differences are there in the different markets that stand out to you?

Photo Credit: Corner Pocket - Day 42 by Vox Efx