Day two has concluded at the Learning Systems conference and I am on the plane headed back to Dallas.  A few thoughts about the conference.  Overall the conference was very productive for myself and my team.  We met a lot of great people who are really trying to understand what they need from a learning system.  As I have mentioned before there are quite a few who are still lost and confused.  I am not sure this conference helped but I hope everyone found a contact or resource that can help them in the future.

I believe that it is more important than ever for the learning systems community to come together and begin discussing more than best practices and fascinating ideas of the system of the future.  I believe it is important that this community begins to find a way to continue the process of making learning a strategic driver in each business.  But that will not happen if we do not come together.  Over the past three years I believe this event has been a wonderful place to begin that collaboration but it needs to continue and we need to expand the reach of these discussions.

This years conference expanded on the past two years by including all learning systems.  Great for us because we focus on all learning systems.  However, I am not sure it was great for the participants because the sessions were too general in nature and there was not enough meat in the discussions.  Many participants asked for the opportunity to spend more time directly with vendors looking at their products and asking real questions in a collaborative environment with other users.  I think this is a great idea but it calls for a different type of conference and a longer conference as well.  We shall see where the future of this event progresses.  I for one will be back next year.