In October 2019 the EU published its report “Skills for
industry, Online training: promoting opportunities for the workforce in Europe”
that collects views from European SMEs regarding the use of (new) learning
technologies.
The report describes the challenges that SMEs face regarding
digital learning projects and especially the risks around selecting the right
suppliers of learning services, solutions and content. The general perception
is rather critical to say the least: quality is perceived as problematic in
areas such as gamification, business systems solutions, user generated content,
serious games, MOOCs, off-the-shelf performance support, social learning and
analytics and virtual reality. But also blended learning and mobile learning do
not score significantly better. Only in video content and bespoke content, the
quality of the offer is reported to be acceptable. are also associated with a
high risk of low quality. That may be on e of the reasons why video-based
learning is especially rising in popularity. Video becomes increasingly popular
as a digital learning solution in all its forms (user generated, bespoke or
off-the-shelf). In many instances, YouTube has become a reference model for
company’s performance support learning. The numbers speak for themselves:
learning videos on YouTube alone gets over 1 billion views per day.
Interesting is the chapter on online course development
costs, especially where it concerns video-based online courses: in the report a
production cost breakdown concludes that one hour of instructional video may
cost between 7.580 and 24.449 Euros.