An initiative of Tagoras (https://www.tagoras.com), Leading Learning provides a range of resources to help learning business professionals excel in the global market for lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development.
Current Leading Learning resources include the weekly Leading Learning Podcast, regular Leading Learning Webinars, and the Leading Learning newsletter.
Major shifts are happening in how leading associations and nonprofits generate revenue and deliver value to members and partners. PAR’s four newest Leadership Advisory Board members, Amy Michalski, Veronica Diaz, PhD, CAE, Jeff Cobb and Jen Troke, shed light on what successful associations are doing differently and how you can keep up.
🔗 Get the insights through the link in the comments.
Last call! ⏳ Our fireside chat with Jeff Cobb is happening tomorrow.
If you haven’t registered yet, this is your final chance to join AJ and Jeff as they deconstruct the 2026 Strategic Outlook for Association Learning.
We’re moving past the "what" and getting straight into the "how":
✅ How to solve the Capacity Vacuum (without hiring more staff).
✅ How to turn "Dark Content" into revenue-generating social learning.
✅ Why the "Netflix Library Model" is failing associations in 2026.
Final Link to Register: https://lnkd.in/e4JGG3bY
Don't let your 2026 strategy be a "library of content no one watches."
See you there!
#AssociationLearning#LMS#FinalCall#Intuto#JeffCobb#LeadingLearningTagorasLeading Learning
A 2-Minute Video That Shouldn’t Exist - https://lnkd.in/e3Uc9hww - The two-minute "Five Little Speckled Frogs" video at the center of this article isn’t remarkable because it’s charming or well produced (though it's both). It’s remarkable because a single individual, using AI tools, created something that previously would have required an institutional budget, a production team, and weeks of work.
Obviously, the barrier to producing high-quality, pedagogically informed educational media has collapsed.
But the author’s focus isn’t on whether the video works. It does. The focus is on what happens next. When anyone can generate customized educational content in minutes—swap the theme, change the visuals, extend the narrative—personalization becomes trivial. But quality does not.
The creator of the example video - Nik Bear Brown - brought deep expertise in neuroscience, language processing, rhythm, and narrative structure. Most people using these tools will not. The tools make creation easy. They do not make judgment easy. And there is currently little infrastructure to help non-experts evaluate whether a customized version preserves what made the original effective.
For learning businesses serving adults, the parallel is obvious. AI now makes it possible for anyone—your staff, your members, your competitors—to generate courses, micro-lessons, explainers, and simulations quickly and cheaply. The production bottleneck is gone (or at least going). What’s missing are shared standards, quality assessment mechanisms, research-backed guidance, and thoughtful curation.
In the broadcast era, expertise was required to create. In this new era, expertise may increasingly be required to evaluate, refine, and ensure quality.
💡 Takeaway: As AI lowers the cost of creating learning content, the competitive advantage shifts from production to judgment. The question isn’t who can create—it’s who can ensure what’s created is actually good.
#learningbusiness#associations#learning#learntech
As much as we love that Gayle Claman, MS, CAE highlights the Learning Business Summit in this post we love even more seeing a learning business leader model effective learning practice by making the effort to reflect and capture some of her key takeaways.
#learningbusiness#associations#learning#lifelonglearning
A virtual event that brings you back again and again - that's the annual Learning Business Summit organized by Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele. In fact, this year's inspired me to write a brief summary of my top takeaways. If you also attended, what were yours?
Partnerships in learning businesses often look promising on paper—aligned missions, complementary audiences, lots of early enthusiasm. Too often, though, they generate more complexity than value.
This Webinar is about the exceptions.
In this one-hour Leading Learning session, you’ll hear candid, concrete examples from two associations where partnerships have actually extended reach, diversified revenue, and increased impact.
David Upbin (Mortgage Bankers Association) and Veronica Diaz, PhD, CAE (EDUCAUSE) will share why they pursued partnerships, what those collaborations look like in practice, and what they’ve learned—trade-offs included. From there, we’ll dig into the real decision points learning businesses face when collaboration is on the table.
You’ll come away better able to:
🔹 Distinguish between partnership models that create value and those that mostly create noise
🔹 Weigh the strategic upside and operational friction of working across organizational boundaries
🔹 Apply peer lessons to your own partnership decisions
Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele will facilitate and incorporate participant questions throughout.
Registration is free.
Attend live to earn 1 CAE credit.
Can’t attend live? Register to receive the recording.
👇 See comments for the registration link 👇
AI isn’t just changing how learning is delivered. It’s forcing a rethink of why people learn—and what learning businesses are really selling.
A few ideas from a recent article on the future of learning by Neil Perkin on Only Dead Fish - https://lnkd.in/e_NSPsaT - stood out to us as especially relevant for associations and other organizations in the learning business
.
▪️ First: knowledge isn’t obsolete—but it’s no longer the point.
When AI can surface “expert” answers instantly, the scarce resource becomes judgment: knowing what matters, what to trust, and how to act in real situations. For learning businesses, this shifts the value proposition away from content accumulation and toward helping learners develop discernment, confidence, and decision-making in consequential contexts.
▪️ Second: motivation now lives in consequences and identity, not information.
If AI can tell you what to do, the reason to learn is increasingly about becoming the kind of professional who can do it well when it counts. That has big implications for how we frame learning—less “learn how to…” and more “become the kind of professional who…”.
▪️ Third: the curriculum model is under real strain.
AI enables highly individualized, demand-driven learning paths tied to real work problems. That’s powerful—but it also challenges traditional catalog- and course-centric models that assume shared starting points and linear progression.
▪️ Fourth: learning splits into two very different jobs.
Productive learning: helping people perform now (AI excels here).
Generative learning: helping people figure things out, build judgment, and grow capability (still deeply human, but AI-augmented).
And finally, a point we were especially encouraged to see reinforced:
informal learning matters—and formats like podcasting can play a serious role. Podcasts respect how attention actually works today, support exploration and reflection, and can create continuity of engagement in ways formal programs often struggle to do. That’s something we’ve advocated for years.
A few questions for readers here:
🔹 Where does your portfolio still assume “knowledge transfer” when judgment and capability are what really matter?
🔹 How are you balancing AI-supported performance with human-centered development?
🔹 What informal learning channels (like podcasts) are actually helping you earn and hold learner attention?
Curious to hear what you’re seeing.
The 2026 Learning Business Summit wrapped up yesterday afternoon. Many, many thanks to everyone who made it possible and made it a success, including ...
... the great session leaders who generously contributed their time and effort to preparing for and leading sessions in which an enormous amount of expertise and experience was shared;
... the sponsors - companies who made clear their commitment to and support for the learning business and learning business professionals;
... and, of course, the attendees who showed up, engaged, shared their own experience and expertise, and made this a great learning experience.
If you couldn't be there or didn't find out in time, you can still see the schedule on the event site (under Bonus Content & Replays) and register to get access to the recordings. (Event link in comments.)
Thanks again to all involved. Keep learning!
#associations#learningbusiness
That's a wrap! Great final Learning Business Summit demo session with Amanda Butler and Raja V. Akunuru, MBA of Cadmium walking us through EthosCE - how it supports reach, revenue, and impact and where the platform is and is going with AI. (EthosCE's reporting/analytics and its ACCME PARS support are always notable.)
Great Learning Business Summit session with Samuel Hirsch of 360Factor to walk through how OasisLMS supports reach, revenue, and impact (quite well) and also how AI is being integrated into the platform (the agents that Oasis has built - and continues to build - into the system are notable).
