“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.” - Diogenes Laertius
President Obama certainly believes it, that is why he has budgeted $ 141 Billion for Education as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. Everyone will wonder where the $141 Billion eLearning opportunity came from!!! That was to get the eyeballs. The actual figure would be much lower, but considering that the total market for eLearning in the US was about $5 Billion in 2007, the opportunities are enormous.
The US economy is seeing radical change in employment opportunities or the lack of them. The stimulus package has been created with the avowed aim creating or preventing the loss of 3 million jobs. Since the availability of manpower would be lopsided in different verticals, retraining would be in great demand.
Why do I think that Learning and eLearning specifically could benefit greatly from this stimulus package? The above were the figures, the other details are below:
The Reasoning:
Training Need in Education : The school sector is in dire need for modernization and spend on capital purchases makes sense. Elearning would enable greater coverage, more consistently then manpower as enhanced manpower can not be consistently budgeted for. Rep. Harry Brooks, Chairman of the House Education Committee, has opined “school systems should not use the federal stimulus funding for personnel ….If you were to use the money for a staff person, that staff person goes away in two years or you have to find the money to continue it, which may not be possible.” Coupled with this is a Graying Teacher Population fuelling shortage of Manpower. As of Aug 2002, more than 60% teachers were above the age of 40, and it was projected that in about a decade more than 2 million teachers would need to be hired. There is already a shortage of teachers. ELearning would bridge the gap as a force multiplier. There would be potentially
Language Issues : As per the US Census, at http://www.census.gov/ there are more than 31 million US residents age 5 or older who speak Spanish, which is almost 1in 10 Americans, of whom only about half speak English well. Content available in 2 languages would enable greater coverage and cover a shortage of bilingual teachers.
Healthcare Training Needs: There is a shortage of trained manpower in the healthcare field and with more than $153 Billion in stimulus funding specifically targeted at Healthcare, the emphasis would be to retrain Unemployed American citizens to fill those opportunities
Information Technology : This saw the least job loss in 2008. With growing emphasis on modernization, including an additional $ 20 Billion in Healthcare IT, Internet and Broadband Infrastructure generally, and raft of new legislation in the Offing, coupled with resistance to programs such as the H1B, there would be a huge shortfall of skilled manpower.
Who Could Benefit:
1. Content Providers in the K-12 segment, IT, Healthcare and OSHA.
2. Content Providers with capability for multi-lingual support and / or Section 508 compliance capabilities.
3. Providers of small to mid level learning systems or LMS.
The Challenges:
For Schools the funds would be given to state and local bodies, so the marketing efforts would be greater. About half the funds would be distributed in the next forty days and the remaining would be given in six months, therefore the marketing burst would have to be really fast.
My desire to share this is to help organizations focus on the positives, and try to go beyond the negativity in the current economic situation. There will always be opportunities, as has been said by Brian Koslow,
“The freedom to move forward to new opportunities and to produce results comes from living in the present not the past”
4 comments:
I think there are two things that are important about the Obama proposals. Perhaps more important than e-learning is the emphasis on learning in general an it's importantance for lifelong success.
The emphasis is still on childhood/early adulthood learning (K-12 and college) rather than on continuous learning, or as they say in the EU Lifelong Learning. It is no wonder the U.S. is falling behind as we have no national strategy for learning from cradle to grave.
I've recently learned that for well over a decade now the EU has recognized and declared the importance of lifelong learning, and e-learning can be a significant part of that.
There are new services popping up all of the time to help people. The only truly American initiative around this is being spearheaded by Brian Tracy and his team at iLearningGlobal.
Larry
"TRAINING" is one of the eternal areas to any learning organization irrespective of the sector it works.
On macro level, there might be fluctuations in Indian economy where major stake of business is dependent on other nations (particularly US). On the other hand there are still companies do bulk hiring’s and provide extensive training on various technologies / skill sets to their Human Assets.
No doubt, there is/will be abundant opportunities for competent trainers in both local as well in international market, provided budgeted training will always help for.
We will provide them training thru different media, fine till here. How many can slog on their own? Where will future teachers come from? Where'll they get hard own experience, which is in short supply?
A practical solution to unemployment is to generate jobs which require minimal training. And go in for continuous learning, in the long term. Possibly, well educated guys who are unemployed can be provided better incentive to teach others.
I actually enjoyed reading through this posting.Many thanks
ELearning services
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