The e-Learning Hype Cycle: Expert's Debate the Issue

Guru Debate> The e-Learning Hype Cycle: Have We Hit Bottom?
Click each picture below to see what these noted Gurus think about the state of our industry.
(Click here to see the Hype Cycle and to read the original article on this topic.)

The Hype Cycle represents the product of Investor/Buyer Confusion multiplied by Spending...There is not difference here from what happened with Sales Force Automation, Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Planning and other IT Bricks disguised as Life Saving Rings...If the Skillsoft-SmartFocre merger ends up as a 1 + 1 = 1/2 like AOL-TimeWarner and so many others, there won't be any investor money...Creative ways of driving the boardroom-resident energy towards the front line will re-start the eLearning reaction in the marketplace.
-- James F. Dowling, Results-Based Leadership

One must look back much further than 1996. Since the advent of the telegraph, people have been "learning" through electronic means. If you stretch your line back to the 1840's, therefore, you'd probably see a very slow and steady rise in e-Learning penetration, with periodic blips triggered by the advent of film/slide projectors, radio, television (remember what the Learning Channel was supposed to do for adult learning?); followed by IIS (no; not Microsoft's server, I'm talking about IBM's Interactive Instructional System for mainframes in the early '70's), interactive videodisc, CD-ROMs (almost infinite bandwidth, by the way), and then lately the Internet. I suspect this latest "blip" was more exaggerated than previous ones because of all the VC money (as one of your guests alluded), as people equated the Internet with the second coming - but it too has retreated back to normal growth patterns.
-- Jim Howe, CTO UserTech/Canterbury Corp

Your perspective is naturally very US centric. Europe is feeling the pain as well and has some parallel problems but the depth of the trough is not as big because the height of the peak wasn't as high. But what was an 18-month delay behind the US in 2000 is probably only a 6-9 month delay now. The cycles are moving closer to sync.
-- David Wilson, Managing Director, eLearnity

We have to differentiate between the financial performance of the major players (nearly all of them technology vendors) and the educational performance of the medium. E-learning is no longer regarded with excitement by corporate or academic educators. Nor is it not regarded with skepticism or fear. The number of learners engaged in e-learning continues to soar, and there can hardly be a company that does not have an e-learning strategy that is a lot less naïve that it was last year...I would expect the e-learning technology vendors curve to just keep on crashing while the more relevant curve (acceptance, utility, and effectiveness of e-learning) soars.
-- Godfrey Parkin, President, Mindrise

Instead of entirely replacing a classroom experience (typically how elearning ROI is measured), we're realizing that CBT/WBT types of elearning can enhance classroom learning.
-- Carol Resor