A Portrait of Learning Portals

A Portrait of Learning Portals
By Tom Barron

Though the term has been stretched across an impossibly broad collection of e-learning offerings, the learning portal concept is more than just marketing. Some call it the stirrings of a long-needed merger with knowledge management practices.

What is a learning portal? If you've ever tried sorting through vendor literature or the Web in search of an ironclad definition, you've probably given up by now. You can take comfort in knowing you're not alone. Even the heads of e-learning companies that offer learning portals of various stripes find themselves at odds over a basic definition.

The reason is simple: The term portal has been claimed by a wide variety of e-learning offerings that have little in common. And as part of a larger industry rush to embrace anything "portal," it's being bandied about wildly.

But behind the marketing veneer of portal fever, there's a solid concept--the notion of consolidating resources into one Website that's accessible to the internal and external customers that need it. While this basic organizational impulse may seem staid, the idea of centralizing information is practically revolutionary in today's wired business world, where information is fragmented across surging numbers of systems and Websites.

The IT arena is embracing the portal concept as an answer to that problem, and the Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) is the new rallying cry--and acronym du jour--for many IT organizations. The EIP, a single location that serves up data from systems throughout an organization, picks up where ERP applications and intranets left off. "Portals enable enterprises to extend knowledge management and business intelligence initiatives within and beyond the walls of their organization in ways that could not have been envisioned two years ago," proclaims an April cover story on EIPs in Knowledge Management magazine.

The learning portal scene

The e-learning field has its own corollary to the EIP in the form of learning portals. But there are several categories of offerings that claim the portal mantel. Best known, thanks to their marketing efforts, are the business-to-consumer (B2C) learning portals that cater to free agent learners. They include a growing crop of portal sites that aggregate content from the technical to the trivial--in some cases, allowing virtually anyone to author and upload their own learning content. The most visible of the B2C portal players are Learn2.com, HungryMinds, Learn.com, Fatbrain, and SmartPlanet. New B2C learning portals appear on a regular basis--the latest entrants are iLearn.to, which launched in mid-April, and SmartForce, which recently waded in with an offering called MySmartForce.

Next are portal sites that target the business community, where IT learning content is standard fare and business or soft-skills content is becoming a sought-after delicacy. Like their B2C cousins, these business-to-business (B2B) portals also welcome individual learners--who one analyst estimates comprise 20 percent or so of their gross revenue. But contracts with training organizations, priced in a variety of ways, are the core business.

Early in the portal competition, size was the key bragging point for the B2B players, with many a press release extolling the number of third-party content providers and courses. But the new area in which these portals seek to differentiate themselves is in such value-added services as learner assessment and tracking, customization services, custom content developer shopping, and other services. The B2B category includes Click2learn.com, DigitalThink, Headlight.com (which targets small businesses), KnowledgePlanet, and TrainingNet among the major players.

A third species of learning portal focuses on a specific industry with content and services. This fast-growing B2B category of vertical industry learning portals, or learning "vortals," includes dozens of sites, some the result of partnerships between trade associations and technology providers. Emind.com (formerly Yipinet), for instance, targets the securities industry with a portal of relevant offerings. EduNeering targets industrial facilities. Learning vortal numbers will climb even faster following last month's announcement that VerticalNet, a company that has established more than four dozen B2B vortals in various industry sectors, has partnered with KnowledgePlanet.com to create learning portals for each (see Newsbytes for the story).

Organizations on the leading edge of the e-learning curve are setting up their own internal learning portals for employees and customers, using learning management systems as their basis (see "Building a Learning Portal"). These business-to-employee (B2E) portals, where some say much of the action will ultimately lie, are largely obscured by the frenzy in the B2B arena. As one analyst notes, they don't generate press releases, but internal portals are being built.

As part of a larger trend toward outsourcing IT for Web services, many technology vendors are rolling out hosted portal services that allow organizations a shortcut around internal IT deficiencies. Early portal service providers such as VCampus have been joined by Arista Knowledge Systems, Click2learn.com, KnowledgePlanet.com, Mindlever.com, and Saba, among others.

Don't cry uncle just yet--there are still more learning portals. The education side of the e-learning spectrum has its own parallel universe of learning portals, including a galaxy of higher-education portals. Some are extending their marketing to the corporate e-learning arena with online MBA and other degree programs. Portals on both sides of the corporate-education divide are beginning to reach over the fence.

Given the breadth of offerings, it's little wonder that many training professionals massage their temples at the mention of the term portal. Aside from the detrimental confusion the term causes, the concept is a keeper, say industry observers. The benefits of aggregated content, learning management capabilities, communities of interest, and the extension of learning to an organization's value chain are characteristics of the portal approach that will propel it long after the term has been consigned to the buzzword scrap heap.

By then, the hordes of B2B and B2C portals will have winnowed from more than 100 to a few broad-based players and one or two within each industry niche. "Only so many Amazon.coms can survive," writes e-learning analyst Cornelia Weggen in a recent study of the market by Hambrecht & Company. "Within the next 12 to 18 months, the learning portal war may well be over."

Views from the trenches

The evolving nature of portals can be glimpsed in the strategies of two B2B portal sites. Both Click2learn.com and TrainingNet were early on the scene with portal strategies--clear back in September 1999--before an avalanche of rivals piled on. Click2learn president Kevin Oakes has stuck to the theme that portals represent an improved approach to organizing e-learning. And the company has broadened its strategy from offering a portal with content and content development tools to one of providing portal development services--from the incremental to the turnkey--to organizations.

A transcript of a recent ASTD online chat featuring the heads of three major learning portals is available here.
"The promise of a learning portal is to provide corporations with an instant virtual university or professionals with one central place for courseware on a variety of topics," wrote Oakes in a recent online chat on portals sponsored by ASTD.

Click2Learn's portal offers an array of its own and third-party learning content, primarily in IT and business skills. It's also first to market with software tools that allow site users to author content and upload it to the site, where, once approved, it can be accessed by others and generate licensing revenues for the author. The Web authoring tool has allowed the portal to harness the Web's primary strength--a huge base of subject matter experts--and grow from the bottom up. Other sites, particularly on the B2C portal side, have also seized on the approach.

Content, however, is just the tip of the well-designed portal, says Oakes. "Aside from aggregating lots of content, which is the easy part, learning portals need to provide other complimentary value-adds such as publishing, learning management, and high-quality courseware." Indeed, the company has been focusing recent months on service offerings that help organizations set up internal learning portals.

Around the same time that Click2learn debuted its portal strategy, TrainingNet catapulted onto the e-learning scene with a learning portal that boasted the largest number of third-party content providers and course offerings. The number has swelled to more than 1,200 providers and course offerings spanning 25 categories. No one disputes its claim to be the largest B2B content portal going.

TrainingNet added another outsized offering in February in the form of an RFP Exchange, where buyers of custom training development services can post an RFP accessible to a broad range of custom developers. Smaller exchanges exist on a regional level--a site called RealTrain serves buyers of classroom training in the Midwest area, for example--but TrainingNet has scored in the "biggest" category again.

Other portals have kept their sights on niche B2B markets; Headlight.com is a good example. Since its launch in 1998, the company has targeted small and medium-size businesses with e-learning offerings, mostly of the IT variety. It recently added basic learning management system (LMS) capabilities to its portal to aid small companies in tracking employee e-learning. The niche strategy will prove crucial as dominant players consolidate their hold in various market sectors, analysts say.

"No one has yet established dominant market share," says Jim Ayube, senior analyst with market researcher The Aberdeen Group. "And none of them have impressed me as being head-and-shoulders above the rest." But marketing and branding will make a difference as the field becomes more crowded, and that will separate winners from losers, he adds.

LMS-portal connection

Meanwhile, the portal services market has become the latest battleground, with LMS makers vying to capitalize on growing interest in learning portals. Their customers include both e-learning content providers who want to establish portals with LMS capabilities and training organizations seeking assistance in bringing their e-learning initiatives under a portal framework.

A recent contract won by Saba illustrates the trend. The company, which eschews the "LMS provider" label and which last fall declined to be included in a federally-sponsored comparison of LMS software (see "The LMS Guess" in our April edition), has moved aggressively into such services as LMS and portal hosting. In February, it announced a contract to provide portal hosting for TrainingTek.com, a provider of e-learning to transportation-related industries. The B2B learning portal that TrainingTek subsequently launched for the aviation industry features such capabilities as personalized profiles for learners and other tracking abilities needed by the regulation-heavy aviation training sector. Those capabilities are drawn from Saba's LMS that are an integral part of its portal hosting.

Saba and Click2learn have also absorbed smaller learning portals into their B2B portals, where in addition to LMS capabilities, a larger audience promises greater sales of content. This aggregation of portals-within-portals is how the portal universe will consolidate, some predict.

The expansion into portal hosting is a logical move for LMS makers, say e-learning analysts. "The technology is getting so complex that it's fueling interest in one-stop shopping," says Weggen. The time involved in building a portal internally and such issues as content access by employees and customers outside the firewall are also sparking interest in hosted solutions, she adds.

Where KM fits in

In many ways, the learning portal concept reflects the maturing of digital learning from stand-alone efforts and department-by-department implementations to more coordinated and strategic approaches. In drawing together learning resources under one gateway Website, however, the portal concept may yield a more profound change--the linking of formal learning that the training industry embodies and informal knowledge sharing that's the domain of knowledge management practices. The earliest evidence of this merging of learning and KM can be found in the tinkerings of LMS makers with ties to the KM field.

A merging of the two disciplines makes sense from a conceptual standpoint, analysts say, since they're both about the transfer of knowledge to empower an organization's intellectual capital. And because both disciplines are harnessing technology to improve access to learning and knowledge sharing, the synergies are obvious. Learning portals may provide the meeting place where the two disciplines can be combined.

"Knowledge management and e-learning are on a collision course," said Click2learn's Oakes in a February presentation. The sentiment is echoed by several market analysts who note that the KM arena has been growing vigorously at the same time that e-learning has taken off.

International Data Corporation raised eyebrows--along with the KM field's profile--with a report last October estimating that Fortune 500 companies lost $12 billion in 1999 due to poor knowledge management practices. In a subsequent report released in March, IDC predicts that the need for knowledge management will drive organizations to broaden their EIPs to be "enterprise knowledge portals" that comprise learning and KM resources. "Enterprise knowledge portals will connect people, information, and processing capabilities in the same environment," says report author Gerry Murray.

Companies charting the middle ground between e-learning and knowledge management include Arista Knowledge Systems, a newcomer that unveiled an LMS with certain KM attributes last October; Lotus/IBM, which is well-positioned in each area with its Lotus Notes and Lotus LearningSpace offerings; and RWD Technologies, which last year unveiled an integrated learning system called ERPSpace that has KM capabilities.

"KM is more about ad hoc learning--learning that happens within the context of doing work, not what's embedded in a course," notes Peter Rothstein, vice president of strategy for Lotus/IBM's distributed learning solutions group. Just within the KM arena, Rothstein counts five separate categories of applications: business intelligence, collaboration, knowledge transfer, knowledge discovery, and expertise-driven systems.

The last two categories have been knit together in a KM application Lotus/IBM is unveiling later this year, code-named Raven. The company is also planning a release this month of a successor to its LearningSpace LMS. Rothstein says technology hasn't quite evolved to integrate the informal information sharing that occurs with collaboration applications and the knowledge transfer arena, where e-learning resides. There are other barriers to overcome.

"In many enterprises you have segmented roles and responsibilities over these areas," he says. "One person may be in charge of e-learning, another in charge of knowledge management, and another in charge of IT--they need to work together in order for these categories to be able to merge."

Still, Rothstein says he "shares the vision" that a merging of e-learning and KM is inevitable. Others, including Weggen, see a melding of the disciplines within a two-year timeframe.

"There are so many factors pushing the two fields together that it only makes sense," she says. Whether learning portals or some successor approach proves to be the altar at which e-learning and KM are joined remains to be seen.

Published: May 2000

Tom Barron is an e-learning analyst in the Learning on Demand program of SRI Consulting Business Intelligence, which provides research and analysis of technology and business trends in the e-learning arena (www.sric-bi.com/lod).