Use of Wikis as Compared to Other Tools

For an upcoming panel session that will be looking at where eLearning is going, I was trying to get a ballpark sense of how much eLearning is being done with various tools as an indicator of where we stand in terms of adoption of eLearning 1.0, 1.3 and 2.0. Heidi Fisk suggested I look at the eLearningGuild research reports. It gives some interesting indications:

Number of evaluations by eLearningGuild Members of the use of the types of tools:

• Courseware authoring tools - 4,000
• Rapid eLearning authoring tools - 3,000
• MediaWiki - 40 users

This analysis is very crude as compared to the rich data. For example, I've not included use of software simulation tools, etc. However, it gives you a rough idea of where it stands.

One thing I would say is that I would expect that we'll see adoption of Wiki tools a lot more - but many of the uses will be more as a replacement of web page creation than as a eLearning 2.0 kind of approach.