Are there too many UK communities and professional bodies supporting workplace e-learning?

Prompted by a piece by Donald Clark which touches (I think rightly) on the problem of "too many membership organisations in the e-learning space", Clive Shepherd lists some of the reasons why rationalisation might be hard, without dissing the idea, and pulls together a useful two page list of the organisations concerned [60 kB PDF]. Clive invites comments on the list, and I am assuming it will evolve a bit, so its URL might alter. In the continuation post below I've included the comment I wrote (from the point of view of my employer the Association for Learning Technology) in response to Donald.

Donald

Back in 2004 in Bristol at HP Labs you made a similar point to an Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Policy Board meeting. Not much has happened since then; and you are not alone in thinking that the "organisations in the e-learning space" is too crowded and complicated - the point is made from time to time by commercial organisations that are members of ALT.

One issue is that several of the membership organisations, including ALT, have both individual and organisational members, even though the processes for representing individual practitioners and organisations are very different. Alongside this some organisations are users of e-learning rather than producers of it; whilst others are both at the same time.

The arguments in favour of rationalisation are strong, partly from the point of view of membership organisations doing a better job on behalf of their members (think how much more effectively the critique of Sector Skills Council silence on e-learning could be made if it was done by one big well argued voice); and partly because there must be scale economies to be had for the membership organisations themselves.

Structured collaboration between membership organisations in the learning technology space, even if not explicitly or implicitly intended to achieve merger seems like a good way forward under all circumstances.

ALT and the eLearning Network are quietly getting on with joint activities on a small scale, for example: we have a membership exchange; we systematically promote each other's activities; we are jointly organising free lunchtime webinars on topics of interest (see the ALT home page); we produced a joint response to last year's eSkills UK consultation on its 5 year strategy. Maybe we should now be putting greater emphasis on this kind of joint work.