Jam Pan set to disrupt learning sector with new creative-led marketplace
Jam Pan, a new marketplace for learning projects, has been launched to connect the UK’s digital creative industries with the learning and development sector -- High-production value talents to deliver the performance-focused elearning people now expect from digital products.
Jam Pan is an online marketplace. Buyers use it to source performance-focused elearning - all of which is built by cutting-edge digital creatives. Customers post their requirements on Jam Pan and the marketplace - including app developers, video producers, animators, games designers and elearning providers - can then bid for the project.
During its beta launch period in 2014, Jam Pan has sourced and delivered a new, harder-hitting form of elearning that is more focused on the learning outcomes needed by the customer.
“Elearning has become too predictable and isn’t delivering the business improvement outcomes envisaged. It’s become predictable for stakeholders, L&D managers, instructional designers and learners: everyone expects to get what they’ve always had. Innovation is stifled,” points out Jam Pan founder, David Wood.
“The digital creative sector produces some amazing stuff, the e-learning sector seldom does - it really is stuck in the PowerPoint past.”
“There are potentially limitless options and ways to meet performance needs, yet if we always start by defining the need as an ‘elearning’ need, we narrow the kinds of solutions we can use. If you want a digital solution, why always pass it to an elearning company?,” asks David Wood.
“Jam Pan’s projects look very different to the predictable, solutions that have defined the sector. Immersive games, animations, hard-hitting video and entertainment are at the core of where elearning is heading.”
“The UK’s vibrant digital creative sector has largely been excluded from elearning development. It was like elearning was operating in its own closed world. And elearning has struggled to generate high levels of engagement. It is too focused on elearning’s past: its old design templates, rules, formats, existing content and existing customer expectations. Learners often start elearning courses and don’t complete them,” explains David Wood.
“L&D has invented gamification to help. But this tackled the problem by adjusting gaming to fit traditional learning approaches,” complains Wood. “My best so called ‘gamified’ learning experience was in a classroom, designed by a games designer, and not an instructional designer.”
In 2014 with the failing of elearning in mind and having worked successfully with games designers, video producers and app developers, David Wood, a former digital creative lead on elearning projects for Virgin Media and Greater Manchester Police, set about creating a service to connect the UK’s digital creative industries with L&D buyers.
Jam Pan is the result of David’s and his team’s efforts: a new kind of learning marketplace that seamlessly connects L&D with the professionals and skills it desperately needs.
“We felt the elearning products had become predictable and ‘samey’. We needed to bring new thinking to the industry and start to excite people again about elearning.”
Jam Pan’s marketplace has the professionals and skills needed in the next generation of elearning: people with backgrounds in learning, design, HR, psychology, technology, marketing, education and from the digital creative industry, with extensive experience across all commercial and public sectors.
“The creative sector is a diverse and hugely competitive environment. It’s not uncommon to find a dozen or more app development companies operating from the same creative hub - each competing to offer more than the next. ‘Challenge’ is in the DNA of these hubs. It drives innovation and ideas and brings harder-hitting performance solutions to the table,” adds David Wood.
Steve Kuncewicz, Intellectual Property, Media & Social Media Lawyer, Bermans, BackOfficeUK, Law Society, one of the early adopters of Jam Pan during its 2014 beta period, is enthusiastic about the changes that Jam Pan can bring to the elearning sector: “There's a famous quote to the effect that the most dangerous phrase is: we've always done it this way. Jam-Pan is disruptive in the most benevolent sense of the word. I'm delighted to support it and can't recommend it highly enough.”