E-Learning’s Long Tail: Leaving Walmart to Buy From Amazon

A few years ago, I read a book thatchanged my thinking across several subjects including economics, personalchoice, networks, and popularity. More recently, it’s also changed my thinkingabout the way we conduct, deliver, and manage corporate learning. More on thatin a bit…

The book was The LongTail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, byChris Anderson. I read it at the request of a colleague and devoured itcover-to-cover during one long plane ride from Boston to San Francisco. Icouldn’t put it down.

The Long Tail covers a lot ofground, but the main argument is that traditional economic models, the onespredicated on concepts of scarcity and physical goods, don’t do a great job ofexplaining the economics of digital assets. An example of a physical goodsmarket is the music section in your local Walmart. There is a limited amount ofphysical space available to stock CD’s. To make a profit, those CD’s need tosell a certain number of copies each month. It’s a classic supply and demandeconomic scenario.

The short and the long of retailing

So how does Walmart decide whichCDs to stock? It’s simple really; they just sell the biggest hits in thebroadest music genres: Pop, Rock, Country, Jazz. You aren’t going to find manyPunk Rock or Afro-Cuban Jazz albums at your local Walmart. In fact, 99% of thealbums on the market today aren’t sold at your local Walmart.

On the other hand, you will findover 65 Afro-Cuban Jazz albums on iTunes. And a whole lot of everything elsetoo. Unlike Walmart and physical retailers, electronic retailers like iTunes,Netflix, and Amazon sell digital assets. They have unlimited shelf-space. Theycan “stock” as much as Afro-Cuban Jazz as they want. More importantly, researchshows that it will sell.

In every year since iTunes began,they have sold at least one copy of every single title they offer. Moreover,these one or two unit sales across millions of “less popular” items add up tomillions and millions of sales. A quarter of Amazon’s book sales come fromoutside its top 100,000 titles. By contrast, the same top 100,000 titles arethe full extent of the sales offering at your local Borders bookstore. It’s theWalmart music section on a broader scale – a larger set of offerings, but stillheavily dependent on physical space and high sales per item.

Borders and Walmart are sellingwhat’s known as the “short head” – the most popular, blockbuster sort of titles.Amazon sells the “short head” too, but they also sell the “long tail” – themillions of less popular titles that might only sell a few copies a year. Throughrecommendation engines, ratings, reviews, and various other filteringtechniques, shopping portals like Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix enable buyers tofind and pursue content deep into the overall collection. For the first time,non-hits and niche content can be found as easily as summer blockbusters andthe weekly top 40. If you’re new to the idea of the long tail, Figure 1 is theclassic, generic illustration.

Figure 1 The generic Long Tail

Implications for learning

So what does all of this have to dowith learning? Quite a bit actually. As learning professionals, we have our owneconomics of shelf space, “sales per item,” and scarcity. Our “shelf space”isn’t limited by physical space, but by time, the time available that learnerscan dedicate to training in a given week. Think of the shelf as a 40-hourworkweek. Most of the shelf is filled with work-related tasks, the individualproduction of each employee that contributes to the overall success of theorganization. Within this larger shelf of hours, a relatively small percentageis dedicated to training and development. It might be just five to ten percentof the overall shelf space.

Given the limited shelf space wehave available, what do we offer to our buyers, Afro-Cuban Jazz or the Top 40? Thinkabout it. We offer the Top 40, the hits, and the summer blockbusters. In theworld of training, these are compliance, certification, and curriculum – thecontent that the greatest majority of learners must know. Even when we buylarge libraries of off-the-shelf content, the libraries themselves are filledwith the “hits” – OSHA compliance, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, LeadershipDevelopment, and so on.

There is nothing wrong with any ofthis. In fact, given the economics of the situation, this is exactly what weshould offer – knowingly or not, we are following tried-and-true economicmodels. We are also limited by our own resource scarcity. Some trainingdepartments struggle even to deliver the Top 40. Throw in a few high-priorityinitiatives like a major application roll-out, a new product offering, or achange in corporate direction, and the typical training organization thinksimmediately about outsourcing to one of thousands of custom-content trainingcompanies that exist for just this reason.

Creating a learning long tail

So now that we know what we are,the next question is, “What do we want to be?” First, ask yourself if, in yourcurrent model, you are satisfying all of the learning demands of your buyers. Mostresearch shows that people acquire 80% of the skills and knowledge they use onthe job outside offormal learning. Clearly our buyers do have other interests and demands. Today,they are satisfying them outside of our formal channels through peer-to-peerexchange, e-mail, one-off phone calls, water cooler conversation, andtime-of-need mentoring. In other words, when they can’t find what they want inthe “short head” offerings from their training department, they source theirneeds through the “long tail” expertise that exists in the information cloud oftheir extended network. They leave Walmart and buy from Amazon.

In other words, our learners arealready living in the Learning Long Tail; the problem is that we are not. Learning ishappening as a black market knowledge exchange over which we exert noinfluence, let alone control. We can’t report on it. We don’t even know who isparticipating and what they are discussing. We don’t know whether theinformation is accurate. Worse, other learners are unable to leverage the timelearners spend finding and sharing good information. Nearly all of theexchanges happen as one-off’s that are not captured or shared with any otherlearners.

Fortunately, the solution to all ofthese issues – the formalizing of learners’ informal exchanges – also providesa mechanism for increasing our shelf space, decreasing our costs forproduction, turning our content creation scarcity into abundance, and providingmethods of oversight and approval for sensitive topics. What does it mean toformalize learners’ informal exchanges?

• Provide learners with the tools to share theirown expertise: course creation, virtual classroom, discussions, chat, blogs,and customizable social profiles at a minimum.
• Provide learners with a place to share theirassets: file exchanges, course uploads, publishing of virtual classroomschedules, shared spaces where they can chat, discuss, and blog about specifictopics and interest areas.
• Enable robust reporting on producers, consumers,and “hot” topics. Who is creating? What is being created? And who is consumingit? What are the trends?
• In addition to deep search, also includefiltering technology like ratings, reviews, comments, and recommendationengines to help learners go deep into your content stack.
• Routing technology and processes to ensure thatsensitive topics are reviewed and approved before being submitted, andinaccurate material is flagged and removed before it can cause any damage.
• Notification and subscription mechanisms toautomatically alert learners to new updates, replies, and edits to topics ofinterest.

Benefits of a Long Tail for learning

Approaches like those noted abovehelp us move a lot closer to an Amazon or iTunes model. They ensure, first andforemost, that the content we’re all sharing is accurate and approved,particularly for sensitive subjects. They also enable us to increase our shelfspace, not by adding more hours to the week, but by decreasing the length andchanging the nature of the content. Participating in a discussion about work isa very different experience than taking a two-hour long course on the samesubject. The former is collaborating as “part of” a learner’s work; the latteris “taking training” about the work. The shelf space for the first activity isthe learner’s entire work week; the latter is still bound by limitations ontraining interventions.

The costs of production in thismodel also change. The size of the training organization is the size of thecompany itself, maybe even the extended enterprise if you are willing toinclude partners, suppliers, and resellers. The costs of production aretherefore spread across the collective contributors rather than just onecentral pool of instructional design experts. This also means that thechallenge of resource scarcity in creating content is replaced with resourceabundance, both in terms of content producers and in terms of the contentitself.

Just as in the Long Tail ofeconomics, the Long Tail of Learning is a theory of abundance, where learnershave more opportunities to learn and teachers have more opportunity to teach.It’s a world where everyone is both a teacher and a learner, where the content isas varied as the work and as deep as the need. It’s a world where the work isthe learning and the learning is the work, and where traditional notions oftraining budgets and employee development time are augmented by flatter, moreopen models.

Does this mean certification,compliance, and curricula go away? No, of course not. Even with iTunes andNetflix and Comcast OnDemand, there are still hit shows, Top 40 music, andblockbuster movies. As we begin providing formal support and infrastructure tosupport our organization’s learning long tail, we still need to create, manage,and deliver the “short head.” What might this combined model look like? (seediagram for the Long Tail of Learning)

Figure 2 The Long Tail of learning

The shift here lies in recognizingthat every organization has a short head and a long tail. In formal, heavilyregulated industries, more focus may need to be paid to the short head. Inconsulting or technology companies, perhaps more focus should be placed on thelong tail. The Long Tail theory provides a model to think through thesestrategies, helping you to focus resources and development dollars in ways thatdeliver the most value and impact to your organization.

Reference

Anderson, Chris.(2006). The Long Tail: Why theFuture of Business is Selling Less of More. New York. Hyperion.