It is 2014 and there is still no high-speed Wi-Fi at the 22nd annual LEARNTEC event. This is somewhat surprising to say the least, given that the organizers claim that LEARNTEC is the international trade fair and convention for learning with IT. Our friends at Unwired put entire ski resorts on the grid, maybe next year the organizers will also manage to bring Wi-Fi to Hall 1 at the trade fair in Karlsruhe.
Apart from that, LEARNTEC was well attended with over 6,600 visitors and more than 200 exhibitors. The program was full of presentations, which took place in the trade fair hall as well as the convention hall. The exhibitor booths had a high-quality appearance. Long gone are the days of many small system booths. International providers are increasingly well represented. Articulate and Upside Learning both made their first appearances this year, and Cornerstone OnDemand and Saba were also present.
LearnChamp opted for openness and room for communication when it came to designing its booth. The welcome desk hosted a lively exchange of ideas on e-learning and talent management. LearnChamp’s key focus at this year’s event was responsive e-learning design (read our blog to see exactly what we mean). Of course, we all know that a picture can say more than a thousand words. That’s why there was an example of responsive e-learning design that could be viewed on a smartphone, tablet, or from a desktop or laptop.
We also conducted an online survey. We will provide some partial results in an upcoming blog post. Interestingly, most company e-learning managers are already planning to distribute content on mobile devices. This is not strictly responsive e-learning design, but it is indicative of the importance currently being attached to mobile learning. In general, mobile learning is increasingly gaining in significance. Providers showcased authoring tools that increasingly support HTML5, such as Content Studio from im-c, Articulate Storyline, and IDEA Team from Link & Link, to name but a few. Exchanging ideas with colleagues and experts also proved interesting, particularly with Tom Kuhlmann from Articulate, who runs the Rapid E-Learning blog , which has over 81,000 followers, and built Articulate’s E-Learning Heroes Community , which has over 107,000 members.
My presentation on ‘SuccessFactors Learning – The Cloud-based LMS from SAP’ on February 5th got very positive feedback. If you missed it, click
here to view a selection of the slides. Summing up, we can say that LEARNTEC remains the meeting point for e-learning managers and providers in Germany. I often wish it could be a little bit livelier, like Learning Technologies , which takes place in London at almost exactly the same time. Still, the event was a success for us and we are already looking forward to many more interesting discussions at LEARNTEC 2015!
