Of course, some (myself included) would argue that (e)Learning is nothing if not an experience. Yet when a Google search on “online degree” returns 250,000 hits, one can make a convincing argument that (to use Gilmore and Pine’s framework) eLearning has become commoditized and currently operates as a “goods” and “services” economy. There are, in fact, very few eLearning providers who see their role as “staging (eLearning) experiences.” Learning Circuits correctly mentions Ninth House and Cognitive Arts as examples; I would humbly offer that this is the raison d’etre of Ellis College.
It will be both intriguing and exciting to see who makes the transition. As Pine and Gilmore say:
Recall that once there were more than 100 automakers in eastern Michigan and more than 40 cereal makers in western Michigan. Now only the Big Three automakers in Detroit and the Kellogg company in Battle Creek remain. The growth of the industrial economy and the service economy came with the proliferation of offerings — goods and services that didn’t exist before imaginative designers and marketers invented and developed them. That’s also how the experience economy will grow: through the “gales of creative destruction,” as the economist Joseph Schumpeter termed it — that is, business innovation, which threatens to render irrelevant those who relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services.
So the question becomes, if you’re an eLearning provider, will you be Kellog’s Corn Flakes of Battle Creek, Michigan, or Dwarfies Wheat Food of Council Bluff, Iowa???
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In the spirit of looking to the future, James Gilmore, in the latest issue of Batten Briefings from the Darden Business School, argues that we’re in an experience economy, and that once experiences become a commodity there’s a next step: “In a Transformation Economy, businesses…
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