“Classroom education is for kids,” says Gerard Rego, CTO of Liqwidkrystal, a developer of learning enhancing products and solutions. “No employee would like to learn in a four-walled enclosure—only a matter of time and liberty can lure employees to learn,” he continues. That said, today’s speed of change begs the question why employees aren’t learning in the new electronic world, like their kids are.
Networking giant Cisco has its own unique in-house e-learning management system across its global operation centers. Sun Microsystems has acquired e-learning vendors to innovatively train its employees. So have IBM, Intel and many more technology companies, and others like the automobile giant, General Motors, the MIT and so on. Across the world, the e-learning fizz is bubbling up. North America, for instance, is this space’s leader evolving both in terms of makers (vendor) and users (customer).
The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), in its recent report quoted that the next curve in learning would be electronic in nature. And the U.S would be on top of the curve. It has also predicted that America’s e-learning market would reach $46 billion in 2005—$6 to $10 billion from the education sector alone. This could also increase the outsourcing of content delivery to low cost and talent-pooled countries like India—something that is happening for the last few years.
But has e-learning really taken off in India? “Yes, it has,” says Manoj Kutty, Senior Vice-President of North Americas Tata Interactive Services (TIS). “To start with, lets take the content space—Indian e-learning management systems are excellent in content delivery, and in the near future there will be extensive work on the platform and services space also.”
While agreeing with India’s growth in the content development stage, Rego digresses in explaining ‘the facts.’ For him, India is still moving at a snail’s pace towards an e-learning management system. With the consumer market in India still not a promising industry sustaining itself, the vendor market is venturing into content development not knowing anything about the content or understanding the consumer, he says.

Ignoring Vitals
At the enterprise level, though, the e-learning industry in India has achieved considerable momentum. But the education industry—the actual market for e-learning—needs a different approach. “Right now, India is still in the first stage of content development—that is mere digitizing of content and stacking this up in the repositories of World Wide Web. But the world, on the other side, is heading towards a new wave of learning—experiential,” explains Rego. This experiential learning is a process of users exploring lessons during the course of the training itself. “India currently lacks this kind of experiential or experimental content development,” he says.
Indian e-learning vendors are all primarily content oriented—the ratio between the content delivery vendors to platform delivery vendors is 90:10. “This is likely because of the cheap investments that flow into this process and also the fast bucks they reap in short time,” says Kutty. “Indian players are clinging on to low hanging fruits without recognizing the abundant opportunities in the platform and service spaces of e-learning.”
“For a vendor to be economically viable, he should at least handle a score of projects at the same time to compensate his losses,” says Rego. Attracted by small amounts and fast return of investment, entrepreneurs are taking a duck on platform technology without realizing the potential. For instance, he continues, a typical vendor in India today is fishing for $12 to$15 for every hour of content provided, while his U.S counterpart earns $80 to $100 on the same. Through this, there is a clear indication that investments of vendors across the world will be the same (according to their currency), but the returns vary widely. So to equate this loss, Indian players usually give way for more contracts.
“Contracts in India are all short-lived,” says Rego. A typical contract in India lasts for six to twelve months, whereas those in the U.S’s range any where between 50 to 60 months, and the vendors handle huge and complicated projects. The average Indian order sizes are between $500,000 to $2m against that of $30 to $50 million in the U.S. All these have rendered the Indian content industry a “still to emerge” sector. On the other hand, platform players in India are few in numbers, as this is a time consuming process. An average platform establishment takes nearly five years of groundwork, requires huge investments and the ROI is not immediate. “This is a tough job for Indians—most of them back out,” laments Rego. He is sure of one thing: that the middleware people—who do the testing, certification and the HTML developing, are the next important players in the industry. Although there will be considerable delay in platform development, the content delivery people will grow to it in short time. There is a wave of consolidation within the Indian e-learning industry—platform, content and services will become one single player.

Slow Expansion
As consolidation, acquisition, and unification of the Indian
e-learning industry churns out, the market is also widening at its own pace. In the last year alone, the e-learning use has risen by 85percent, creating history in the space. Like their global counterpart, Indian players too are divided on two business segments: B2B and B2C. While the B2B has seen an increase in the recent acquisitions and consolidations that took place in the industry, B2C market is still in the “promising” stage.
“Today e-learning is a part of all the businesses. For an enterprise to function effectively, e-learning has become a basic infrastructure, and e-learning will soon make the transition from being an early market technology to mainstream technology and product,” says Rego. This deployment of electronic experiential based learning will not only cut costs for the management, but also give sufficient time and space for employees.
At the consumer level, the e-learning market in India is currently $5b and analyst predict it to increase by $13b in 2005, while the U.S market is expected to reach $46b—$6 to $10 from the education sector alone—in the same time.