The eLearning vendor landscape is changing. Try to keep up if you can! Learn about the acquisitions and changes being made by major eLearning vendors.
Many vendors continue to be specialists, concentrating on one or two proprietary products or approaches to design and development. A small number of others are expanding their offerings to cover the common needs of eLearning development teams and to add newer approaches to design.
Learning Solutions will continue to look at the specialists and proprietary products. In 2022, however, we will publish occasional articles that cover vendors who provide broader coverage and a diversity of approaches to design and delivery. This article is the first of this latter type. Please leave comments below if you like this approach.
The eLearning Brothers growth
Shawn Scivally launched eLearning Brothers in 2009, soon joined by his brother and co-founder Andrew Scivally, working from their basement. I interviewed Andrew on February 7, 2022 via Zoom from the latest company office (the basement office is long gone into the distant past). With their fast growth and diversified products and acquisitions, Andrew said, “The eLearning Brothers is not the company you think you know.”
From the beginning, the objective of the company has been "Solutions That Amplify Learning: products and services that help achieve better outcomes." (Figure 1) However, this did not become fully realized in a hurry. At first, eLearning Brothers was known for templates, but by 2013 the company had outgrown the basement, moved twice into bigger offices, and added custom eLearning development services. This may be the way in which many in eLearning still think of them today. Not to mention the BroBands at conferences.
Figure 1: The eLearning Brothers Overview in February 2022
Hello world
The eLearning Brothers received their first DemoFest award in 2013 for "Best Soft Skills Solutions" and made their first appearance as exhibitors at DevLearn 2014. The eLearning Brothers arrived on the Inc. 500 list in 2014. At this point, they were already experiencing continuous exposure and growth, and beginning a continuous stream of top industry awards across all categories of eLearning.
In 2018, the Brothers hosted their first conference, eLBX Live, and they organized their first eLearning Rockstars Stage at Devlearn.
Growth and acquisitions
Between 2019 and 2022 the eLearning Brothers:
- Completed their first $1 million custom development project and integrated their Cutout Characters into Microsoft 365
- Acquired Trivantis and Edulence, and hosted the eLBX Online Conference and Virtual Reality Expo
- Acquired The Game Agency
- Acquired Rehearsal and Origin Learning in 2022 for a total headcount of 500 employees in the US and in India—two major acquisitions in two months
What does this extended design and delivery model mean for eLearning Brothers customers?
First, eLearning Brothers customers in the US are 90% of their total, and these are big customers. Along with the increase in experience, research and development facilities, additional capacity, custom services, technology services, and data migration that Origin adds, the eLearning Brothers organization can support newer approaches to design and development, especially through the Rockstar Learning Platform, which is designed for high-demand learning needs.
Beyond that, CenarioVR adds immersive and interactive capability. Rehearsal is a video-based practice and coaching platform that large companies are using for sales enablement and soft skills development. The coaching, guided learning, and practice elements Rehearsal adds are not possible to add through other applications. ReviewLink speeds up the review process with subject matter experts (SMEs). The Training Arcade adds flexible game development and gamification templates for small and medium businesses.
The established applications from the eLearning Brothers are proven in themselves to add value: Trivantis (authoring), CourseMill (LMS), and the Asset Libraries that continue to be available for integration with other authoring tools.
The eLearning Brothers represent the key to creating better learning experiences
While smaller vendors can provide specialist and proprietary products, and many of these are excellent, they are not always easy or even possible to integrate with other applications. Vendors such as eLearning Brothers who provide broader coverage and a diversity of approaches to design and delivery that are more readily integrated into workflows for development teams are more likely to suit the range of business from small to medium to large organizations. We will be looking at other vendors with a similar philosophy for their offerings, but eLearning Brothers seems to be one to best reacquaint yourself with early in 2022.