The eLearning Guild is now The Learning Guild. Here’s Why.

On May 7th, we announced a change to our brand from the eLearning Guild to the Learning Guild. As a member of our community, you may be curious about why we have made this change. This post will share some additional context.

The update to our brand isn’t meant to send a message about a change to our future focus. If anything, the change to our brand is being made to better reflect the conversations we are already hosting today and, more importantly, to be more aligned to the work that the people in our community are already doing.

To better understand why we made this change to our brand, I think it’s important to first look at the past, and how our industry has changed since the Guild first launched .

People define the term elearning a number of different ways. One of the earliest definitions I’ve seen described elearning as “learning facilitated by the use of digital tools and content that involves some form of interactivity”.

Twenty years ago that was an effective definition because it described how elearning was different than the classroom instruction most people had in mind when they thought of learning.

But our world has grown increasingly digital. The walls separating the physical from the digital have been torn down by technology being ever-more seamlessly integrated into our daily lives, and by extension, technology has become a tool naturally enabling the behaviors that support learning. This, more than anything, has transformed the work we do every day as learning and development professionals.

Learning facilitated by digital tools, content, and interactivity no longer describes just elearning; it describes how we support learning in general in a modern digital world. 

Updating our brand to The Learning Guild is in many ways an acknowledgment of what already is. The use of technology to support and enhance learning is no longer an exception; it’s the norm.

In truth, what I’m describing is the lens through which we have always hosted our conversations as a community. If you look at the articles, research reports, and sessions at our online and face-to-face events, you’ll see people from our community sharing how we can use digital tools to help people learn, and how we can innovate our practices as a profession.   

The Learning Guild will continue to host the conversations you expect from us, including:

• Conversations that harness the power of elearning (however you may define it)
• Conversations that explore how new technologies can enhance our work
• Conversations that build our skills and push our practices further as an industry
• Conversations that help prepare you, and your organizations, for the future of work.

We look forward to exploring this exciting future together with you. I welcome any questions or comments you may have about this change, or any feedback you may have about how we can better serve you.

Thank you for being a part of our community. I look forward to seeing you soon.

-DK