There's a market research report making the rounds that suggests the global e-learning market will slow to only $50.4 billion by 2020. First of all: Jeez, only $50 billion? And second of all, you'd never know it from today's e-learning players.

The e-learning space is seeing significant action from many sources, including everything from job skills coaching to full-blown learning management systems (LMS), which have been evolving from cumbersome on-premises, self-managed video and Web servers to much more easily managed and implemented Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models. Even so, a recent report from market research firm Ambient Insight, aptly titled "The 2015-2020 Worldwide Self-Paced eLearning Market," claims to have data that the five-year annual growth rate for self-paced e-learning products has flattened to just one percent, which will have a slowing impact on e-learning revenue and yacht sales to the newly rich.

e-Learning Ripe for Innovation

But that seems to be in direct conflict with the actions of many new e-learning and LMS companies, which are entering the market in droves and refining their offerings. Self-paced, skills-oriented learning in particular is a popular offering, probably because of other studies (like the recent Gallup-Purdue Index 2015 Report, which is based on interviews with more than 30,000 graduates) showing that more college students are being forced into debt to get their degrees; overall, only half of them strongly agree the experience was even worth the investment and that number drops to only 26 percent for students attending the most expensive kind of learning institution (namely, private, for-profit universities). In response, e-learning companies are focusing not only on making education less expensive and more jobs-focused, but they're also learning more mobile and less time-consuming.

Newly financed LearnUp is a prime example. Founded by Alexis Ringwald in 2011, the company recently secured an $8M financing round led by NEA and Shasta Ventures. Ringwald describes her company as focusing on the skills gap she's observed between employers in retail and other customer service-focused arenas and the junior and entry-level applicants who typically seek those jobs.

To close that gap, LearnUp will be offering batches of 10-minute lesson modules that can ground students in the basics needed to land a particular job, including product knowledge and retail processes, for example. There's also job coaching necessary to particular organizations, including Old Navy, AT&T, Staples, and similar companies with whom Ringwald has already established partnerships.

This focus on smaller, more easily consumed learning content is mirrored in other areas of the eLearning market, too. LinkedIn, for example, purchased Lynda.com earlier this year for a not-insubstantial $1.5B. While Lynda.com doesn't exclusively focus on short-cycle learning modules, it's got a healthy and growing sampling of such modules in its catalog. It's a catalog that is likely to grow in this regard given the typical LinkedIn user's focus on quickly obtaining job skills in order to exploit new opportunities.

Even private companies such as Microsoft are following suit. Since 2011, Microsoft has been offering customers the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA), a free e-learning resource for IT professionals looking to grow their skills with new Microsoft products. The learning topics are similar to what you'd get from its for-profit and more in-depth training arm, Microsoft Learning, but MVA delivers courses that typically run anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and that primarily focus on primers and introductory materials.  

Learning on the Go

The other standout trend amongst e-learning entrepreneurs is mobility. Not surprisingly, this trend is not only prevalent in wealthy countries with rich mobile network infrastructure but also in less well-developed geographies in which potential students have difficulty finding reliable access to the Internet; Africa, in particular, is home to several start-ups focused on mobile e-learning.

Rethink Education, out of Cape Town, South Africa has built a Web and mobile-based platform for educational content specifically formatted for mobile phones. Aside from appropriately formatted video, Rethink Education also exploits a variety of instant messaging (IM) platforms to disseminate its content, including Bambisa, Mxit, and WeChat. Sterio is another African example of mobile e-learning that actually delivers lessons via pre-recorded, SMS-triggered voice calls, which makes them usable by students using even older or basic phones.

Back on this side of the planet, U.S. companies such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) and Trunity Holdings are also providing mobile-optimized learning content, with this partnership offering formal education tracks for K-12 educators on a global basis. Not only does this provide reliable access to HMH learning content from a wider variety of devices, but its global availability means that schools and teachers can customize curriculum content to suit their regional (and even individual) needs, while still retaining a single, secure location from which to access content.

Overall, revenue projections may paint a long-term slowdown picture today based on one narrow analysis perspective. But the combination of rising education costs versus a decreasingly affluent student base (as well as a constantly changing skills ecosystem and a growing, more competitive global workforce) spells nothing but growth for this segment for the foreseeable future. You can expect to see more new technologies and start-up announcements in the e-learning space in the coming years.