Certain trends that have been in the news are now settling into standards. For instance, delivering to mobile devices is now almost a given for most companies creating eLearning for their employees. Video is much more common now as it has become easier and less expensive to create and edit. eLearning lessons are now shorter and fewer in a course than in the past, where it was not uncommon to have dozens of lessons in an eLearning course.

What’s trending now? Here are my top six observations.

1. Certainly, the use of wearable technologies is starting to make inroads. Conferences sessions on how to incorporate MyoBand, The Bird and other devices that strap onto our arms and fingers are becoming popular.

2. More importantly, technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and 360° Video are now being seriously considered for many learning needs. As with any new technologies, these should be used only where they make the most sense.

For instance, VR can be a viable option to help those learning surgical procedures or how to respond to a fire. It adds a sense of realism that the brain finds difficult to distinguish from reality, so that learners are much more ready to react correctly in those situations.

3. Social networks have begun to be used more formally as part of eLearning curricula. The notion that networking with others in a learning experience is a form of cheating has disappeared in the light of the benefits that occur when team members, even those spread around the world, contribute to solve a problem, whether in reality or in eLearning.

4. After some initial sputtering, Experience API (xAPI) and CMI5 are now quickly becoming more prominent as a form of tracking progress. Historically, there has been a great dissatisfaction with Learning Management Systems, partially because you were limited in what you could track with them. We are now finding ways to create Learning Record Stores inexpensively and more easily, and we can define our own data to track. This is also leading to the idea and trend of learning anywhere and in different ways and being able to track that learning.

5. After years of virtual obscurity, analytics is now enjoying a lot more attention. This is one of the reasons why xAPI and CMI5 are now being taken seriously, and it has also led to companies creating their own form of progress tracking too. Public awareness of how much big data is being analyzed in how we shop online, in what websites we visit, in what news we find interesting, and much more has reached new heights. This is now translating to a greater desire to see the real results of eLearning deployment. It’s an area that I am keen to see bear fruit.

A movement has begun to bring eLearning development into the hands of true programmers who know how to create highly interactive and media-rich lessons using straight up HTML5, CSS and JavaScript rather than use a traditional authoring tool, which is always more limiting. It remains to be seen how much this trend grows considering that many who consider themselves eLearning developers today are not inclined to learn coding.

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