Research Report on the CORPORATE E-Learning Industry
China Distance Education (Information) April 2005
By the Market Research Office of China Distance Education
Ⅳ. Analysis of E-Learning Characteristics of Current Chinese Enterprises
Currently, the nascent market of Chinese corporate E-Learning market has the following characteristics:
1. Industry scale and development speed are lower than expected.
According to CCID Medium, the Chinese enterprises spent as much as 10 billion Yuan early in 2001, and investment in E-Learning distant training accounted for 0.1% of the total budget. This portion was estimated a dramatic growth of about 30% by 2005. However, in this year 2005, the total realistic scale of the entire corporate E-Learning industry has not made the breakthrough of 100 million, and the ratio is not even 1% of the enterprise training investment. The development is far less than what it was expected.
This gap does not indicate there’s no future in corporate E-Learning industry itself; this industry is brought about with the E-commerce booming, and unavoidably subject to the frantic E-commerce influence of that time. People at that time inclined to view E-Learning as catholicon to cure all enterprise training and learning problems, hence the over-optimistic estimation of Chinese corporate E-Learning industry in terms of development scale and speed.
The other important reason is that the estimation was based on the statistics of development scale and speed of developed countries, such as USA, without considering the realistic problems of Chinese enterprises like scale, infrastructure platform building, acceptance of E-Learning, training investment and personnel qualities, hence the over-optimistic estimation.
2. Basically in the phase of E-Training
One property of Chinese corporate E-Learning is that they are mostly in the phase of E-Training. The term “E-Learning” or electronic learning used by developed countries led by U.S. traditionally emphasizes the element of “learning” in “teaching and learning”, and also indicates the wide acceptance and establishment of a learning organization among enterprises.
However, most Chinese enterprises have not built a complete training system, neither the effective implementation of a “learning organization”, despite the wide acceptance of the concept. So, corporate E-Learning are more likely to be “E-Training” in which information measures are used to replace part of all of the traditional face-to-face lectures.
3. Huge difference in regional markets
The corporate E-Learning market can be divided into Class A market (large cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou), Class B market (middle cities like Shenyang, Wuhan, Qingdao, Dalian and Chengdu) and Class C market (small cities under provinces). Currently, about 85-90% market share is contributed by Class A market; the second market share is only 10-15% also, and the Class C market share is almost nothing. (See Figure 3)
The corporate E-Learning regional market is concentrated on large cities where the overwhelming majority of the large enterprise implementers are distributed. Of course there are existing clients in small and medium cities, such as insurance companies and banks, nevertheless, the platform deployment and content distribution are mostly in large cities.
4. Huge Gap between Industries
The industry distribution is very unbalanced among those clients that already implemented E-Learning. According to our collection and analysis of the main E-Learning enterprise clients list, we find such industries as IT/communication/electronics, finance/economics, education/training, government/institutions account for the main portion, while clients from restaurant/retail/commerce/trade, transportation/construction, energy/chemistry are very few. See diagram below.
This difference is resulted from the advantages of the better E-Learning enterprises in terms of information appliances, technologies, skills and ideas in information technology application, which also indicates that the corporate E-Learning are restricted by those elements.
In China, the corporate E-Learning which has just a loose tie to traditional enterprise training should be categorized as enterprise training. However, given the fact that most E-Learning enterprise clients are from the IT circles, for lack of enterprise training background, their E-Learning are more likely to be influenced by the technical ideas and categorized into the domain of enterprise information system. In practice, the corporate E-Learning has the tendency to be separated from enterprise training. As a new method carrying dual attributes of training and enterprise information system, the corporate E-Learning is inclined to dissociate from enterprise training, as the second attribute is often ignored. This situation has been improved at present, people tend to pay more attention on training effect in corporate E-Learning, instead of technical means.
(Cited by Lv Senlin/Wen Benwen)