Like so many others, I’ve been spending my Friday afternoons engaged in “Video Happy Hours” with colleagues, friends, and even family. Each time, there’s a common theme among the virtual crowd of our imagined revelry. The questions all come out differently, but we’re all asking the same thing.
“How are you; what’s different?”
For our part, much is the same. Though we haven’t been in an office together since March 13th (yes, I count each and every day), we have all been learning to work from home well. In the last few months, we’ve shipped our new Rustici Engine 20.1 release. We’ve participated in virtual webinars in lieu of the conferences we’d normally be attending this time of year.
“So… business as usual? Anything surprising or exciting?”
Like everyone else in the online education, training, eLearning, and talent management spaces, we’ve seen increased usage and demand caused by the sudden boom in remote work. We’ve also had increases in site traffic as more people are researching how to utilize eLearning standards and technologies to quickly adapt their training for online delivery.
The more surprising part, however, is the demand from our existing customers. In the last two years, we’ve put a lot of time into moving our focus from simply helping learning platforms use eLearning standards towards helping companies connect all of their systems, their customer’s systems, and their learning content. For many customers, this functionality has been instrumental in helping them, and their clients, deliver and track PDFs, videos, and other content that has traditionally lived outside of the LMS.
For other customers, they’re starting to look towards the future of eLearning. We’ve been happy to collaborate with our customers and help imagine what their learning platform might become. This may mean adding new capabilities to our software or changing our roadmap but often we’re able to provide our customers with a way to accomplish their goals through an existing product or feature.
Of course, the eLearning industry will evolve, both in the coming months and beyond, to accommodate changes in the way people experience things like school and work. We don’t know today what shape the industry will take going forward, but we do know that we’ll be here helping both new and existing customers bring new capabilities and products, to market.
