Research Report on the CORPORATE E-Learning Industry
China Distance Education (Information) April 2005
By the Market Research Office of China Distance Education

Ⅲ.  Problems from Purchase to Implementation
The implementation of the corporate E-Learning is a complex systematic project, involving many aspects such as enterprise management and corporate culture. With new education and training patterns, the “networked learning” has re-defined the relationship between teachers and students, learning styles and perceiving. These problems cannot be solved by one simple software system, and must be considered from the perspective of systematic ideas. The solution should include application and implementation, not just simple software purchase. Typical problems of Chinese enterprises in carrying out EL project are: (1) Scarcity in investment. The training issues usually are not big concerns in the core policies. Many decision makers believe that the training and educations are personal issues of employees, and do not identify the relation between enterprise learning and employee training, as well as the significance of building a learning organization. (2) Backward IT technology applications. Some enterprises have poor network infrastructure building, hence the limited network bandwidth. The employees have little IT application abilities. (3) Restriction of EL standards. EL requires fully open data and products that are compliant with industry standard and support data exchange and mutual operation with other application systems; therefore, it should support a variety of data formats so as to improve the service quality. (4) Change of learning habits and styles. Due to EL’s inherent weaknesses of tight learning schedule, lack of face-to-face communication and classroom atmosphere, a considerable number of employees cannot yet adapt themselves to the networked learning environment. (5) Content production. The construction of curriculum and other materials is a long-term project. The enterprises lack material making tools, the support of teaching design and technology/fund/personnel pool, therefore are not able to make full use of existing resources for employee training. (6) Provision of an effective learning environment. For lacking of modern education know-how and teaching design expertise, the enterprise can not provide the satisfactory learning atmosphere, community environment and personalized learning space yet, which is worsened by poor networked experiences among most employees.

1.    Prospect of Six Major Tendencies
In general, the development tendencies of enterprise EL platform and curriculum building are: (1) Compliance with the international industry standards and more open, advanced criteria. (2) Inclination to the enterprise knowledge management, performance and decision-making support, which attaches more significance to the evaluation and analysis, as well as the data standardization and interfacing with HR and other application systems. (3) The individualized and collaborative learning strategies that pay more attention to the employees’ career planning. It gradually transfers from “just in case” to “just in time, just for you”, and the Blended Learning and Project Learning have become the popular learning strategies. (4) The booming practice and theoretic study are calling for state policies concerning corporate E-Learning which includes policy, standard, quality assurance and other regulations, which will facilitate international exchange, cooperation and compliant operation in domestic market. (5) As much as the EL platforms are concerned, the domestic proprietary platform products are well localized, cost-effective and customizable. While their foreign peers and JV products have better management, design theories and technical orientation, which is eclipsed by price, localization, services, and usually cannot be customized. As the enlargement of domestic EL, maturity of standards and involvement of universities/institutions, the demand for curriculum is increasing. There will be more curriculum with proprietary IPR supplied for the Chinese market, and a great number of excellent EL curriculum will be produced on the basis of cooperation between businessmen, society and universities/institutions.