The Lambda Team returned from this year's DevLearn Conference in Las Vegas still buzzing from all the action. North America's leading learning technologies event, the conference features over 250 learning activities spread across seven days that are designed to get people engaged with some of the new and exciting learning technologies entering the market.
We were at DevLearn to get the word out about our learning analytics solution, Zoola Analytics. The response was super and showed us how excited people are about the possibilities that advanced reporting capabilities of Zoola.
We also learned a lot about the trends to watch for in learning technologies. Here are the top themes and trends to look out for in 2018.
Each year content creation tools and the skills that go with them get more and more advanced. There were several companies that focus on particular aspects of content creation, such as gamification, animation suites and voiceovers. Content creation is all about building engaging content, which requires a variety of tools and resources.
Are you producing static content that lacks energy? DevLearn showcased some exciting new products that can help bring your content back to life.
There were a huge number of LMS vendors and partners exhibiting at the show. Learning management systems are some of the most diverse platforms on the software market today. There’s a different platform for nearly every industry and specialization. And yet, the LMS market is still expanding with new companies finding new ways to specialize their platform to a new market or niche.
Also expect to see companies that were never before in the LMS market starting to make moves into the field, like Adobe, Articulate and LinkedIn. All three of those companies brought their own LMS platforms to DevLearn, which are designed to complement the content creation and storage tools they already offer.
The TinCan/xAPI/Learning Record Store (LRS) discussions are also starting to gain more traction for 2018. We noticed that a lot of attendees were considering or already using LRS systems to capture their learning interaction data. Zoola is xAPI-compliant and easily integrates with LRS systems. If you’re thinking about using an LRS system, Zoola could be your favorite integration!
DevLearn featured a wide range of exhibitors, from future-facing technologies to more commonplace practical applications. All of these new technologies are designed to provide learners and instructors with better learning experiences.
All of these experiences produce an enormous amount of data. And this big data needs to be harnessed and analyzed in a way that is useful and meaningful. LMS reporting will continue to play a more and more significant role in the marketplace, as organizations seek to analyze data more effectively across a variety of data streams.
In fact, reporting was possibly the most prevalent theme that we encountered at the conference—specifically, viewing and understanding learning data. Many organizations are looking to adopt a new LMS or new content, or they’re starting to work with xAPI-compliant content. At DevLearn, they were looking for ways to take the vast amounts of information that’s gathered from their LMS and start to make sense of it.
If you’re asking these questions as we enter 2018, Lambda is ready to help. Zoola Analytics is a future-ready reporting and analysis tool that gives you complete access and control of your learning data. Many attendees were using LMS systems that lacked the comprehensive reporting tools that Zoola offers. The reporting tool’s impressive capabilities include:
DevLearn was a tremendous experience that generated a lot of anticipation for the coming trends in learning technologies. If you were one of the many attendees that we had the privilege of meeting, we’ll be connecting with you again soon. If you didn’t get the chance to go to DevLearn 2017, we’ll look forward to seeing you next year! Be sure to connect with us at DevLearn 2018—we’ll have even more features to make reporting and accessing learning data easier than ever.
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