esearch Report on the CORPORATE E-Learning Industry
China Distance Education (Information) April 2005
By the Market Research Office of China Distance Education

 

Ⅱ.  Focused on Networked Curriculum Purchase
Lack of resources, materials, teaching design methodologies and curriculum design technologies, most domestic E-Learning enterprises purchase networked curriculum. At present, the curriculum popular in corporate E-Learning domain includes those lessons that are compliant with standards, based on web pages and flow medium. The first type represents the main stream and the orientation of future development.
Restricted by IPR and comprehensive strength, there are just a few domestic content providers, such as Era Training, andHuaxia Dadi. While a bunch of foreign companies dominate the market, such as NETg, SkillSoft, Harward Business Review, GlobeKnowledge, Cyberwisdom, IBM China and Motorola China. Usually, Enterprises also need certain customized curriculum content development, which is completed by the independent curriculum suppliers. At present, the curriculum content is mainly completed on the basis of cooperation between the curriculum provider, university and research institution, as well as the typical enterprise users, which covers such fields as business, management, team, sales, finance, performance and many other fields. There are two curriculum sales modes, and the curriculum provider possesses the copyright curriculum generation tools.
For instance, with the curriculum making tool KnowledgeProducer of IBM China, the client provides curriculum system, the curriculum provider is responsible for teaching designing and curriculum making. When the collaboration brings a certain amount of curriculum hours, the curriculum provider will grant the usage right of the curriculum development tools to enterprises, for them to develop their own lessons, while the curriculum provider is responsible for the whole curriculum system, teaching design, content and technologic production. Under such mainstream mode, the curriculum is usually sold on an hourly basis. Meanwhile, most domestic curriculum providers manage to get the distribution sales right, and localize foreign curriculum. For instance, cooperating with the U.S.-based SkillSoft incorporation, Beida Online has localized the mature AICC-compliant curriculum and promoted it into the domestic market.

1.    Standard-compliant but lack of certification
Different from academic degree-oriented education, the enterprise training attaches more significance to the learning-based performance. Also, since the enterprises directly purchase the curriculum content when implementing E-Learning projects, they are especially concerned with inter-operation between the learning management platform and curriculum content; therefore, the standard-compliance is better obeyed in enterprise training than it is in academic degree-oriented education.
The present main stream standard for corporate E-Learning is AICC –Aviation Industry CBT (Computer-Based Training) Committee (AICC) (http://www.aicc.org), usually version 1.3, and the present version for newly-emerged SCORM (Advanced Distributed Learning System http://www.adl.org/) standard is 1.3. SCORM is seeing a market exploration and implementation. It is compliant with XML, more open and flexible than AICC, and represents the direction of future development.
In terms of platform and curriculum products alone, within the field of domestic corporate E-Learning, an overwhelming majority of them are complaint with AICC 1.3, but almost none of them are certified by international standard organizations. The SCORM-complaint product right for high volume promotion has not appeared yet. And there’s very little domestically proprietary products certified by international authorities. While this portion for their foreign peers are noticeably higher. What’s more, some foreign enterprises have been directly involved in the standard making process.