As stated on their website, Leading Learning “provides a range of resources to help learning business professionals excel in the global market for lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development. Current Leading Learning resources include:
- The weekly Leading Learning podcast
- Regular Leading Learning Webinars
- The Leading Learning newsletter“
Leading Learning focuses on six types of resources:
Leadership, Strategy, Learning, Marketing, Technology, and most relevantly to us here in ETEC 522, Trends.
Their overall focus is on “Learning Business Professionals” which are people who work businesses that serve the global market for continuing education, PD, and lifelong learning. They are most interested in understanding the business side of education – a perfect fit for this course – such as “how to attract, convert, and retain customers for their learning experiences in an increasingly competitive marketplace”.
Leading Learning’s resources are useful for any educational professional. The resources available and discussed are often relevant and useful, there are a huge number of “shows” to listen to, all with accompanying show notes. For an example of what you may find on the site check out the following article from March 20, 2018:
12 Trends (Still) Disrupting the Market for Lifelong Learning and Continuing Education
Perhaps the main downside to this source of Market Projections is digging through the vast archive of weekly content to find what you are looking for.
Sources:
As was alluded in the description, Leading Learning is a large collection of information relevant to learning industry professionals. This vast collection is multimodal and continuously updated with new articles and insights that are aggregated from a variety of contributors, a majority of who hail from the educational sector.
Although at first appearance the resource may seem dauntingly large, Leading Learning tackles this by placing their tagging convention directly on their homepage, which will allow users to isolate topics that are pertinent to them. Furthermore, their popular Posts & Episodes section provides the audience with a quick overview of the articles and podcast episodes that are generating the highest attention / traffic. Their Resources section also does a fine job of curating valuable articles, research and identified educational trends. I particularly found their “Review my LMS” to be a smart resource that affords LMS builders with an outlet to showcase and refine their developing products.
Jeff Cobb’s “Could Associations Replace College” was a specifically interesting and relevant projection currently being showcased in their Trends section. Cobb dives into the notion that an emerging third sector of education (Associations) could potentially position itself to disrupt the post-secondary education sector by introducing a leaner and more affordable alternative which is better aligned with today’s technological trends, need for lifelong learning and workforce demands. An example of the relevance of this projection is demonstrated by Google’s recent announcement that they will now offer three to six month certificate programs in a variety of IT related fields.
https://www.leadinglearning.com/could-associations-replace-college-revised/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/13/google-announces-certificates-in-data-project-management-and-ux.html