
The Evolution of Online Learning and What Comes Next
January 21, 2025
This time of year, your email and LinkedIn feed are probably filled with trend forecasts and bold opinions on the best new tools and technologies. Those kinds of lists are helpful in a way, but they often fail to answer the question everyone has:
What does this mean for me?
Tools like generative AI are so exciting because they have the potential to change how we construct online learning experiences. But they’re still a means to an end.
To know if a tool is relevant to your organization, you have to define what end you’re working toward.
Before looking to the future of online learning, let’s look back on how the industry has evolved.
Shifting focus from reach to outcomes
In the 10 years before the pandemic, the online learning industry was focused on achieving scale – the more learners you could reach, the more successful you’d be. New tools and technology like MOOCs and mobile learning unlocked the possibility to reach thousands or even millions of people across the world.
Those tools made it possible to quickly shift from in-person to online learning when Covid-19 disrupted the education industry in 2020, though the transition was certainly bumpy for many learners and organizations. The acceleration in digital learning technology caused by the pandemic revealed that success in online learning cannot be solely defined by scale.
Now the question is what does great online learning look like over the next 10 years?
Designing learning experiences for High Engagement at Scale®
The key to great online learning is to pair the scale of the MOOC era with the engagement characteristic of in-person learning.
“What we’ve seen post pandemic is that engagement has to be there,” says Studion CEO Furqan Nazeeri. “Otherwise it’s scale without impact.”
It’s insufficient to measure learning outcomes as simply the number of enrollments or course completions, although these metrics have their place. Instead, it’s essential to link learning experience to real-world outcomes for learners (career opportunities, skills) and for organizations (decreased support costs, ROI).
In building over 350 learning experiences, we’ve seen time and again that the programs that deliver meaningful outcomes are those designed for High Engagement at Scale®.
Research from Harvard supports this approach, citing “the principle of engagement at scale, not one or the other,” as integral to any meaningful expansion of the university’s teaching and learning activities.
How to know which tools and trends to invest in
With technology changing so quickly and a huge array of tools to choose from, it’s impossible to do everything (and inadvisable, in our opinion). At Studion, we’re constantly experimenting with new technologies like generative AI to find the most promising applications that can unlock new levels of engagement in online learning experiences.
That said, new tech isn’t always the answer. Sometimes simple solutions are the most effective. We help clients navigate the litany of options to choose the right technology for their needs.
Use to assess new technologies and trends and determine which are most relevant for your business and your learners.
Using AI to increase learner engagement
And finally, we arrive at artificial intelligence. AI has so many applications in digital learning experiences and nearly as many risks. We’ve written before, so we’ll be brief here.
Right now, we are most excited by AI’s applications for personalized learning at scale and active learning applications, as well as its potential to lighten the content-authoring burden.
“It’s clear that there are many ways of improving content authoring with AI, but adding active learning elements is something AI excels at,” notes Nazeeri, citing the Stanford reflection chatbot is an example. “I have been really impressed with LLMs trained on a corpus of knowledge and then incorporated in a learning experience as a curious mentor.”
Digital learning trends to watch
While generative AI will dominate the discussion of online learning technology in 2025, we are taking note of a few more trends.
Virtual reality is being used to translate hands-on learning, like skill demonstrations, into interactive online experiences. Cross-platform accessibility will become more important as learners access online programs from multiple devices. And alternative credentials – certificates, badges, nanodegrees, microcredentials – will continue to gain in popularity as the value of a traditional degree is debated.
In learning design, trends like microcredentials and gamification should be deployed judiciously to increase learner engagement, rather than for their own sake. While this technology holds promise, it must align with an organization’s brand identity and learner needs to make sense as a strategic investment.