Eight months have gone by since we visited Learning Technologies Exhibition in London. Let's see if, during 2020, the trends turned out to be those indicated during the fair.

About Learning Technologies 

With over 8,500 participants, 200 free seminars and 200 exhibitors, the event is confirmed as the leading world showcase of learning technologies, offering a unique and exciting environment for professionals in the sector. In 2020 the exhibition was held in London and, shortly before the advent of covid19 and the subsequent lockdown, we had the chance of visiting it together with other members of our forma.association. On that occasion, we were also able to meet some of our customers and potential customers as well.

2019-2020 Trends

During the fair, we could see the confirmation of many trends seen last year, and in particular:

• commercial platforms with a course catalog already loaded inside;
• content specialists offering specific course catalogs;
• software specialists for the production of content, especially in video format.

2020 Trends: AI and Content Creation

At Learning Technologies Exhibition, we then noticed at least a couple of further and slightly different trends that have been confirmed during 2020:

• Content creation and distribution tool incorporated into your application. This means a workflow that allows you to draw content from various sources (particularly internal to the company) and distribute them, doing a sort of content curation, in some cases managed by artificial intelligence algorithms;
• The integration of your LMS with something else: if in recent years we have experienced that the LMS should integrate with Human Resources applications, this year we have seen that many specialized application manufacturers - evidently realizing that they cannot supplant existing LMS - focus on the fact that their tools can be integrated with existing platforms.

Learning Technologies 2021?

Learning Technologies is certainly an event in which large multinational or British players are the masters, from the point of view of media exposure and traffic at the stalls. Articulate, Kineo, SumTotal, Adobe, Moodle, Cornerstone, Open Sesame… all names that certainly have much more important resources than the ones we have.

Last year we had the impression that there might be some space left for players of our size, as long as they identify their positioning well: an open source platform, shared with a team of companies, consultants, trainers and content developers providing the full service and that can be modified according to the customer's needs. 

This year's visit confirms on the one hand that it is an event dedicated above all to big players, on the other it suggests that there is probably room for a different type of positioning and approach, as long a this is well understood and conveyed.

Despite current events do not allow us to travel much, we hope we'll be soon able to attend Learning Technologies and other similar events, which are always good occasions of enrichment and profitable mutual exchange.