I don't cover AOL and MSN very much, precisely because I think that they are dinosaurs. But this article is worth a read because it identifies why they are dinosaurs, and there's a lesson for e-learning there. The author writes, "I see a clear trend toward 'unbundling' of online services... There's little room for all-in-one services such as AOL and MSN in this unbundled future -- although they won't disappear overnight; inertia alone will keep millions of subscribers under their big tents." Well, now, if we think of bundled services in the abstract, it is easy to see that today's education providers (and today's e-learning technologies) are some of the biggest bundlers of all. If you want a bit of learning, you need to sign up for a 40 hour course - or a 40 course program. If you want a few specialized learning objects, you need to subscribe to a 20,000 object library. If bundling doesn't work for AOL and MSN, then it seems likely that it won't work in learning either.
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