A Sleeping giant awakes!

Kudos to Microsoft for deploying a learning platform in most major enterprises whilst nobody was looking! (If you haven’t seen their announcement, watch the video at the foot of this post!).

If you are looking for Collaborative learning, social learning, virtual classrooms or just somewhere to curate performance support assets, then many organisations will already have this if they have adopted Office365. What was missing was the functionality to pull in elearning courses from vendors such as LinkedIn Learning or you own in-house developed courses and assign them to groups of people – possibly based on groups that already exist if your Teams deployment is more mature.

Does this though mean the end of the LMS? Absolutely not! Even in a post Covid world, the classroom will still survive albeit no longer as domionant is before and I don’t see any functionality around that having been announced as yet. The same goes for the management of Virtual Classes – maximum attendee numbers, wait lists, prerequisite training etc will still be needed by some organisations. And if you are educating customers and/or partners, then the LMS probably still has a big role to play. The Teams platform may also not offer the full functionality you need for formal certification/acccreditation regimes and competency/skills tracking functions that we see in the major enterprise LMS vendors is also not there.

I suspect though that there may be a team out in Seattle who are smiling knowingly to themselves if they read this and that this announcement is just the start.

So, has the sleeping giant of the learning world woken up and caught us by surprise? Judge for yourself by watching the video below.

(Article originally published on LinkedIn in July 2020 (1) A Sleeping giant awakes! | LinkedIn)