In the 80s I was heavily involved in technology-enabled learning. Then knowledge management caught my attention in the early 90s and I drifted away. I still kept a sideways glance at what became e-learning and occasionally got involved in a project. Last week I got a nice update and was pleased to see the e-learning is joining both the on-demand world and enterprise 2.0. The last e-learning firm I worked for was a division of NETg as they had acquired our mid-sized Bedford, MA based firm, Spectrum Interactive. How I learn that NETg was acquired by SkillSoft a few years ago to help make it one of the major players in this field.

SkillSoft now has over 6,000 e-learning titles and many performance support products and services. In the past few years they have begun to offer their courses and services as an on-demand solution. Now 98.5% of the customers who use their SkillPort learning management system are using SkillSoft’s on-demand service to host their content. The other 1.5 % still host their SkillSoft courses within their firewall. This on-demand hosting is up from last year when 95% choose the cloud. SkillSoft even finds that many clients who develop their own custom e-learning courses are giving them to SkillSoft to host. Since custom learning materials often contain strategic company information, here is one more example of the growing confidence in the security within the cloud.

Recently, I spoke with Stephanie Pyle, Manage, Product Marketing, at SkillSoft. It is nice to hear from Stephanie that e-learning is keeping well up with the times. One of the reasons for the popularity of the on-demand service is the ease of maintenance. SkillSoft takes care of course updates for materials within the cloud. Customers who host their material behind the firewall get monthly updates on CDs and have to make the changes themselves.

Another major initiative from SkillSoft is the introduction of portlets that integrate within major portal vendor products such as IBM Websphere, Microsoft Sharepoint and SAP NetWeaver. These portlets operate through the WSRP standard and provide an easy way to embed personalized, relevant learning into enterprise portals, reduce deployment time, cost and effort. This ease of access for employees also increases learning content usage and makes it easier for customers to make learning assets available to everyone. In addition, the portlets allow administrators to track data, perform maintenance, launch new content, and can be scaled to any amount of new users without down time.

There are five portlets appearing soon. First, the search and learn portlet allows employees to search across SkillSoft assets with the portal. They do not have to go to a separate learning management system. The portlet also only allows access to courses they are entitled to see by their company and all activity is tracked. There is a “my plan” portlet that allows then to set up their own learning plan and have their manager also provide input. The “my favorites” portlet allows them to bookmark stuff. They can also create a specific learning curriculum with another portlet. Finally, SkillSoft offers a Books 24 x 7 service that will now be available through a portlet.

The Books 24 x 7 offering is a performance support tool that allows for full text search of all the books in the catalog. You can go directly to a specific section of a book to learn how to do a specific task such as set up an Excel table or discover someone’s best practice on a particular topic. Reading books online does not sound like fun to me. However, I think this is an excellent use of on-line access to books as you are finding and then going right to the part you need to solve a current work problem. It turns a library into a custom performance support tool. It also gives firms more control over the quality of what employees use as many employees will simply turn to Google if the company does not provide an easily discovered solution. With the portlet you do not have to leave your work environment to access company sanctioned material. SkillSoft has found a lot of interest in portal integration as companies are looking for more useful content to better leverage their, sometimes sizeable, investment in portals.

We have long known that learning activities are most effective when delivered at the time of need. Placing access to learning activities through the portal makes sense and opens up new ways of integrating and tracking these employee learning activities. Learning becomes less a separate training activity and more a part of the job.