e learn expo

February 22-23, 2001
Palais des Congrès, Paris

This event was the “coming out party” for eLearning in France. Several hundred delegates, several thousand visitors to the exhibit area to see four dozen exhibits.


The pig? Part of the unintentionally zany opening by the conference organizer, Sally-Ann Moore of Intermedia Exhibitions.

Jacques Attali -- a professor, author of more than 30 books, and former advisor to Mitterand -- legitimized the event by likening eLearning to the discovery of a new continent. Life is a learning portfolio. In France, mass education has been a failure; the future will see perishable diplomas. Professional and university training will merge. Courses will be rated, as in the Guide Michelin.

Sheila McGovern, an analyst in IDC’s London office, presented her view of the eLearning marketplace. eLearning on the continent is miniscule but it excites interest because its combined annual growth rate from 1999-2004 is 83%, compared with 11% for instructor-led training. Over the period, European IT training delivered online will increase from 5% to 23% of the market, reaching revenues of $2 billion in 2004. Sheila believes platform providers and software developers will gain market share over content developers.

The conference program lists every session.

Alain Madelin, President of the Liberal Democratic Party (“the French Bill Clinton”) gave an address. Among the exhibit booths, he’d seen pioneers of our exciting new future. Humankind has gone through the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and now this, the Knowledge Revolution. Nodes and neurons. He even managed to make an allusion to ROI. After waffling for a few years, la France has decided that eLearning is real learning – and therefore eligible for government set-asides of 3% of wages for professional education.

In a well-attended session, SmartForce described the Unisys project. 86% of the participants would recommend this approach to others. Unisys gets 70,000 visits/month; 3,500 employees have completed courses; 2,998 are enrolled in 40+ technical certification programs. 13,500 individuals are enrolled. Replacing ILT has lowered overall training cost 36%. The first-time pass rate has risen from 78% to 95%.

Hughes Roy of Arthur Andersen has 80 consultants working in European eLearning (30 in France) out of 250 worldwide. A study they conducted in 4/2000 and updated this month found that the new economy creates pressures to create new jobs, retain existing employees, and upgrade skills. Traditional training can’t do this because it’s too general, too expensive, and tough to update. In April 2000, 11% of the companies participating in the study had implemented eLearning solutions; now the figure is up to 60%. Of these, more than half were satisfied or very satisfied, 6% were unsatisfied, and 37% were just starting up.

Andersen found that the main contraints to eLearning in France were:

2001

2000

IT infrastructure 37%

Lack of info on eLearning solutions 72%

Corporate culture 29%

Corporate culture 70%

Mastery of new technologies 29%

Mastery of new technologies 63%

The exhibits were a mixed bag. Interwise, SmartForce, netG, Unext, Deloitte, Intellinex, Centra, Docent, Isopia, and Saba had had a 30x30 or larger exhibit spaces. Others were stuffed into various nooks and crannies. Some of these were hard to find, in spite of the fact that there were only about 45 exhibitors in toto.

Signage was in French, in English, and in Franglais. Some vendors had glossy brochures. Others had material only in English.

Rumor had it that several hundred people had registered as “delegates,” i.e. paid their 950 Euros to attend the sessions. Ten times that many came to see the exhibits.

 
There’s something familiar about the “e” in the center of the logo of Cegos, the largest ILT shop in France. They were playing video of a talking head on a hi-res Sony screen. It tells you something about the sophistication of the crowd that this was a major draw in the exhibition area.

Intellinex (the former L.E.A.P. group at Ernst and Young) feels they have an advantage, having opened up in Amsterdam rather than London. The Scandinavian market is fully saturated (it’s only 17 million people, after all). E&Y is targeting France, Germany, UK, maybe something Mediterranean. German market is already very competitive – 200+ German vendors showed up at LearnTech this year. Intellinex is selling a full range of services + the LEAP platform to run them on.

Deloitte divides its European market for eLearning services into four pieces. UK/Nordic is managed out of London. Benelux is out of Brussels. DAC (Deutschland-Austria-Schweiz) is run from Munich. The Mediterranean/Latin area is managed from Paris. Benelux customers are quite savvy. The Germans plan things to death. Interest in Italy and Spain is picking up.

Isopia claims to have an infinitely scalable LMS. It costs about $70 a head in quantity. They’re trying to land an immense deal with Pearson (“Can you handle a million simultaneous users?” They claim that JavaBeans somehow enables this.) Their sales people are inept. Another vendor tells me their hype exceeds their reach. Their e-testing partner brought three people here and gave a lot of demos.

icGlobal has a learning management system that’s easily adaptable to other languages and cultures. They scored big points here when they’d say that Parisian French is not the same as Canadian French (Zut!, alors.). Their conversion to double-byte characters paves the way to the Chinese market; they already have a Mandarin version running.

Unext is finding much greater interest in their short courses than in their MBA program, and they are shooting to have sixty titles up and running by the end of the year.

HP is poised to release a series of eBusiness courses that include an introduction to eBusiness, presentation of the marketspace, one-to-one marketing on the Internet, e-CRM, introduction to B2B, and transaction security. They just bought this courseware from someone else and I didn’t have a chance to see it.

WBT Systems is positioning itself as an “LCMS”, a learning content management system. They are bragging about joining a consortium supporting Cisco’s Internet Quotient initiative (along with Docent, SABA, Centra, NetG, and KPMG.)

Docent, SABA, and Centra appear to have a major presence in the European market.

Margaret Driscoll’s keynote opening day two was an unabashed IBM advertorial.

The best presentation I attended was Ben Watson’s. Unlike most of the hype from the stage, Ben was sincere as he described lessons learned and new directions in mentoring. Proactive email, Collaboration sparked by controversy, and Community Guides who nurture conversation with open-ended questions.

This event will replay in Amsterdam June 26-27, and Hong Kong August 30-31. The Hong Kong event is expected to be big.

Hotel de Sens

More Paris snapshots here

  
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