Product Life Cycle and eLearning

Imagine this: You switch on your TV and see an advertisement for an elearning course! {It is not a random thought though. Tata Sky offers many such programs that teach you spoken English. See picture. }

You pause your TV and select the course to order it. Is this a distant possibility? Not really, consumerism may actually come to a point where you could pull learning instead of getting pushed into schools and being 'institutionalized'. This could become reality, if you actually think of an elearning course as a product. You must then apply the basic concepts of a Product Life Cycle or PLC to an elearning course. Let us understand how.

Typically, every conceivable product goes through a PLC, consisting of four phases (Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline). Similarly, if we map a new elearning method such as Adaptive Learning to these four phases, we would ideally arrive at better ways to design and market our courses. Additionally, we would also arrive at ideal marketing strategies appropriate for a particular stage of the PLC.       

Let us now look at the characteristics of adoption of Adaptive Learning and learner characteristics and plot these against the 4 stages of the eLearning PLC. The table below shows you how different kinds of learners take up eLearning at different points of its PLC.

As you can see, in the introduction stage, eLearning adoption will be low. In the Growth stage, adoption rises rapidly. In the maturity stage, adoption peaks and in the decline stage, there is a gradual decline. This could be due to two reasons: there are better offerings that address the same need or maybe the decline is because of the changing taste of consumers.

However, in the eLearning context, learning is not likely to decline. In fact if you look at the PLC of typical ILTs, in many organizations, they are in the decline stage, while eLearning has to traverse a long PLC. In the Growth stage, more clients may demand for courses ‘adapted’ to their learners and there may also be software catering to the same.

 The method may get adopted globally and every vendor would be offering ‘Adapted’ content. When a new technology is introduced, there will be an eventual decline. Let us now see how the marketing strategies would differ for each stage of the eLearning PLC.

To conclude, merely stopping with this won’t suffice. To ensure absolute customer delight, we must go further and accord each elearning course the same seriousness that we give a product. Acknowledging a course’s shelf life and ensuring re-usability will boost the ways in which a vendor could garner more of the elearning market’s share.