Tuesday, 1 November 2016 - 1:12pm

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Published by Matthew Davidson on Tue, 01/11/2016 - 2:00pm in

COFFS Harbour company Janison has today launched a cloud-based enterprise learning solution, developed over several years working with organisations such as Westpac and Rio Tinto.

Really? In 2016 businesses are supposed to believe that a corporate MOOC (Massively Open Online Course; a misnomer from day one) will do for them what MOOC's didn't do for higher education? There are two issues here: quality and dependability.

In 2012, the "year of the MOOC", the ed-tech world was full of breathless excitement over a vision of higher education consisting of a handful of "superprofessors" recording lectures that would be seen by millions of students, with the rest of the functions of the university automated away. There was just one snag, noticed by MOOC pioneer, superprofessor, and founder of Udacity Sebastian Thrun. "We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product," he said. That is not to say that there isn't a market for lousy products. As the president of San Jose State University cheerfully admitted of their own MOOC program, "It could not be worse than what we do face to face." It's not hard to imagine a certain class of institution happy to rip off their students by outsourcing their instruction to a tech firm, but harder to see why a business would want to rip themselves off on an inferior mode of training. Technology-intensive modes of learning work best among tech-savvy, self-modivated learners, so-called "roaming autodidacts". Ask yourself how many of your employees fit into that category; they are a very small minority among the general population.

The other problem is gambling on a product that depends on multiple platforms which reside in the hands of multiple vendors, completely beyond your own control. The longevity of these vendors is not guaranteed, and application development platforms are discontinued on a regular basis. Sticking with large, successful, reputable vendors is no guarantee; Google, for instance, is notorious for euthanising their "Software-as-a-Service" (SaaS) offerings on a regular basis, regardless of the fanfare with which they were launched. You may be willing to trade quality for affordability in the short term, but future migration costs are a matter of "when", not "if".