Delegates at the Charity Learning Consortium Conference, held in London last week, said that live online environments would be their preferred L&D technology for the coming 18 months.
During a conference session on "E-learning secrets of success", delegates were asked which technologies they would be using in the coming 18 months. Live online learning was followed by custom content, cloud computing, ideo/user generated content, mobile and inhouse and external social media.
Laura Overton, managing director of Towards Maturity, hosted the session and also shared preliminary findings of Towards Maturity’s latest learning technology benchmark, which surveyed more than 600 organisations - 13% of these were from the not-for-profit sector.
Overton told delegates that, according to the Towards Maturity findings, customised learning content was the priority for organisations in 2011 and that live online learning had been increasing steadily across all sectors over the last 12 months, with virtual meetings used by 65% of organisations and virtual classrooms by 46%.
The main benchmark also saw a marked increase in the use of external social media sites in learning, with 41% now experimenting with sites such as Twitter and Facebook within their learning compared to just 11% in 2010.
Whilst the charity sector believes social media will definitely add value to the sector, Overton said, it will not be as influential this year as the more proven learning technologies.
And despite the fact many charities use learning management systems to improve management and administration of learning, not one table of delegates in the conference hall included it on their top three most influential technologies for the coming 18 months.
Watch Laura Overton talk through delegate priorities at the Charity Learning Conference.
