by Rick Parris
What’s a killer app look like anyway?
What is the definition of a killer app? The first killer application was undoubtedly VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program that debuted in 1979. It doesn’t sound like much, but at the time it was revolutionary. It was the motivation for much of the early success of the Apple II Computer. Later, in the mid 80s, Pagemaker emerged as the killer application that drove the sales of both Apple Macintosh computers and their Laserwriter printers. It brought publishing to the desktop and sent shockwaves through the printing industry. Since those days, we’ve seen killer apps appear in different market spaces, but they’ve always had the same effect. Killer apps topple the established leaders and distribute capability to the masses. Killer apps level the playing field.
When we look at the adolescent industry called eLearning, we have to ask: is there a killer application in this marketspace? Clearly, the internet is the killer platform for eLearning. That, we offer, is a given. Is there anyone who really believes that the future of education will include paper-based text books, film-strip projectors, and 16mm movies? The coming universality of broadband internet access will provide us with a solid, stable environment for training and education. But what will the be the application that makes use of it? Is there one breakthrough technology that turns everything on its head, makes the industry exciting, and levels the playing field?
To find out, let’s look at the state of eLearning playing field right now.
Of Kings, Communities, and Boutiques
Currently, an impartial observer might conclude, there are three major players at the eLearning poker table. Let’s call these players The Content Kings, The Community Builders, and The Boutique Trainers. Each has staked out their market space territories, eyed up the competition, and implemented well-conceived strategies. Let’s look at each of them in detail:
The Content Kings are those eLearning players who either possess, or have invested heavily in the development of, content. The Content Kings are betting that the barrier to entry in content creation is high. If, for example, a firm has a wealth of evergreen legacy material that they’re working to repurpose for use in the online marketplace, they may wish to maintain an old-media business model. Previous relationships with K-12 and Higher education markets might give “the big three” textbook publishers a natural advantage. It is a strong hand and the Content Kings are going “all in.”
The Community Builders have developed a collection of online tools for facilitating student/teacher communication, organizing information, and tracking student progress. Think of them as a digital bulletin board or an online Trapper Keeper. These tools sometimes fall under the general rubric of “Learning Management System,” but there is great variety in this ecosystem. There are companies and organizations that offer only assignment and progress tracking, others that offer only community message boards, and still others that offer tightly integrated environments which promise “complete” solutions. The Community Builders might start off marketing a single successful tool and expand through development or acquisition into a large, multi-featured, enterprise-wide behemoth. Often, once these Community Builders have reached a tipping point, they become unwieldy. Once sold by virtue of their capabilities, they resort to brute force marketing to lock in school districts and universities. The Community Builders’ hand may not be as strong as the Content Kings, but it is still a winner.
The Boutique Trainers are the third serious players in our eLearning community. There are no monsters in this arena. These players are small, decentralized and legion. These are the small training firms that build one-off courses for corporate, small government agency, and non-profit organization clientele. They might leverage some of the Community Builders’ toolset when they land a large contract, but more often than not they build one-of-a-kind training tools. Their products are unique, idiosyncratic, and probably built for the moment. Some have standards such as SCORM imposed on them by their contract, if there are federal budgets involved, but not always. While there are no industry leaders among the Boutique Trainers, some estimate the marketspace for their services to be nearly as large as that of the other two eLearning players’.
Taking a look at the three players in this game, let’s think again about the idea of the killer app. Do these players offer the killer app? Are they developing it? Are they blocking it from being developed?
The marketing departments of the Content Kings would tell you that each has a breathtaking new product under development. They’ll point to their new LMS or upcoming offerings as “the next big thing.” But, talking truth to power, the kings of content may have a vested interest in putting the brakes on conversion to an online environment. Like the record companies in the last century, textbook publishers have much of their net worth tied up in paper-based publishing technologies and distribution. At the very least, it must have crossed some of their executives’ minds that dragging their feet works to their advantage. Slowing down the migration to the online world works in their favor. Hopefully some internal voices are pushing them to heed the lessons learned by the recording industry, and the motion picture industry—get in front of the migration to online or be trampled by it.
More likely to be the source of the eLearning killer app are the Community Builders. These players are all about the online environment. They have the captive audience of their schools’ teacher and student population, populations ready for new features and fresh content. Here again the marketing departments of the Community Builders will tell you that they have the killer app. The whole integrated enchilada. But one need only talk to a college-aged kid about their experience with these systems. There is not a ton of excitement about these systems. Depending on the technical comfort level, teacher and student reaction ranges from mediocre acceptance to rabid frustration. The only people who seem satisfied with these solutions are the salesman.
Finally, we can look to the Boutique Trainers for the emergence of a killer app in eLearning. The sheer variety of solutions in this marketspace may make this an ideal growth medium for a future application. Small teams of developers, each creating their own solution to the problem of online training, means that thousands of untried ideas are being tried and tested every day. This would be the eLearning version of letting “a thousand flowers bloom,” but it may produce a result. Certainly a lot of bad ideas will be tried, but we’re looking for that one really good one. Some of the biggest players in the other two categories (Riverdeep, Blackboard, etc.) began in this category and developed their solutions on a smaller scale. While this may be the source of the eLearning killer app, the current contender doesn’t spring to mind.
We may need to keep waiting.
Looking at the market forces at play, we have to wonder if the eLearning killer app can emerge the way the current players have divided up the playing board. The larger companies are looking to carve out a territory and defend it. The smaller companies are trying to find their big break and emerge as a contender. It is in all the players’ interests to divide and conquer the education and training customers, rather than cede the online environment to any one system. They’ve all learned the lesson of the battle between Microsoft and Apple for the supremacy of a desktop Operating System. Which do you imagine they’d like to emulate in the battle for supremacy in the eLearning desktop? Are they like The Three Stooges, all trying to get through the same door at the same time and getting stuck? No one gets through the door in that scenario. While they’re trying, someone else may walk through that door and offer a solution that could make them all irrelevant.
It seems certain that an eLearning killer app will emerge, one that leverages the use of a ubiquitous internet, one that makes eLearning easy, affordable and exciting. While we may not know from where it will come, we may be able to describe some features we’d expect. It will probably be an open source solution, based on open standards, and accessible to anyone who wishes to play. We’d expect a model for this might be the way BSD has become the core of the Mac operating system or the way WebKit has become the basis of multiple popular browsers. The profit motive still works when open source is in the mix. We’d expect the killer eLearning app to make use of the current trend badly termed “Web 2.0″. That is, we’d expect it to lower the barrier to entry in content creation and allow users to generate and share content easily and freely. We’d expect this content to be available through something similar to the iTunes App Store. And finally, we’d expect the hardware solution to have a form factor similar to the Amazon Kindle but with multi-touch and color like the Apple iPhone.
Is all of that too much to ask? We hope not. We think that might make learning exciting. Stay optimistic and stay tuned. The future generally shows up before you expect it.
Rick Parris has been developing interactive training solutions for 25 years. He runs Standard Imagination, a small eLearning business, from his home in Warrenton, Virginia.
