Our successful outsourced e-Learning service has just received a welcome make-over. We’ve made a number of adjustments to our user interface and to the administration side which will allow us to rebrand the solution for those wishing to add e-Learning to their offerings.

These changes mean that we can co-brand our solution entirely from the look and feel of the system to the automated emails that get sent to learners.

What this does is enable those looking to offer e-Learning as a value-add to their services to do so easily and without any new skills or extra workforce. We take care of everything while still enabling the individual or organisation to remain the primary provider.

Partners are able to offer our full range of e-Learning courses, their own or any combination. Our existing benefits of online or offline delivery with centralised reporting still apply.

Who would use this service? We see it being of use to web-based service companies wanting to add value to their offerings to their clients, training operations to offer e-Learning material in support of their face-to-face training, subject matter experts wanting an easy way to reach the market, consultants wanting to implement organisation-wide change but lacking the resources to reach staff outside of the management circle, and any organisation wanting a quick and easy way to reach its staff, clients or members with single maybe urgent initiatives or longer term learning programmes… and a host of others.

Contact us for more info.

It is a PC basics suite that consists of 6 chapters:

1. PC Orientation
2. Windows XP
3. Internet Explorer
4. Outlook Express
5. Excel
6. PowerPoint

The programme is user-friendly, simple and sticks to the basics so as not to bomb the learner with non-core knowledge. Learning is delivered using voice-over that talks you through the information throughout the programme, giving you the choice to read or listen or both. Then there are also numerous simulations so that the learners can try what they’ve learnt in a safe and educative environment. (more…)

• PrimeSales - A methodical approach to buyer-focussed selling
• PrimeManager - Guidelines for troubleshooting, brainstorming, developing staff, and building teams
• PrimeTeam Building - Creating and motivating teams and promoting collaboration

These are available right now to clients of our managed e-Learning service.

For now these courses are only available online until we’ve updated all the courseware servers around the country. After that learners will have the option of viewing this material online or offline.

One way to translate these documents into e-Learning is to incorporate some interactivity, the odd quiz and some fresh looking graphics. You might end up with something like this (a very simple example):

The benefits of this approach are that you don’t have to amend the content too much, once you have a framework in place for converting the written words into visual display it can be reapplied to many learning modules without much change. The result is that you can push these out at a fair pace without placing too many demands on yourself or your client.

The only drawback to this approach is that the content remains rather dry – you’re still working with the basic text of the policy and just dressing this up in a way that’s slightly more palatable. If the goal is to really grab the attention of the learners you may want to consider building scenario-based courses or at least building a few scenarios into the standard courses.

Learning By Doing

A scenario places learners in a situation that more closely mimics the environment in which the learning would be applicable. They are asked to make choices and are provided feedback regarding that choice. Immersing the learner in the subject matter in this way can assist greatly in knowledge uptake. It’s more fun for the learner, and being more fun means the course is also more memorable. Compare the previous example to this one:

The use of scenarios requires more work since you have to be more creative in transforming the learning outcomes into a suitable “story”. Also, in the construction of the course, you may require many more graphics and other images that aren’t as easy to come by or make – especially if there is a central character of whom you need many shots at different angles and in different situations. (One way to solve this is to take the pictures yourself of course).

So, scenarios aren’t always the best choice. If you have a tight deadline or a large number of similar modules to release (such as with company policies) you may be better off sticking to something simpler that you can replicate more easily. If you happen to have a training challenge that might be effectively handled by a scenario, go with it. I believe the increase in time and effort will be worth it.

So it seems that the world’s financial situation is getting worse, not better. I’m sitting writing this barely 1km North of Wall Street, the focal point of all American news, policy decision-making, presidential candidate speeches and grey hairs for the last two weeks.

I’ve already heard of numerous people losing their jobs here on Manhattan – one poor guy was retrenched from Bear Stearns only to move to Lehman’s and be retrenched again – and many signs point to the start of the next global depression, let alone recession.

With all the doom and gloom predictions in the air, companies are naturally looking to tighten their belts and lower costs. But just because the global economy is taking a knock doesn’t mean competition will decrease (unless you happen to be one of the few surviving financial firms in America…). In fact, isn’t quite the opposite is likely to be true as companies defend their bottom lines?

If the competition is increasing, there is even more need to have a competent workforce knowledgeable of the company offerings, able to communicate efficiently, able to sell prodigiously, cogniscent of financial discipline and generally good at what it does.

So, I would argue 2 things:

1. Training is MORE necessary than ever in times like these
2. e-Learning is the ideal solution for delivering more for less

Typically we estimate that e-Learning can save organisations up to 60% of their total training costs. It saves money in the following ways:

1. The content is reusable so costs decrease over time and use
2. Expensive face-to-face time is reduced or eliminated
3. Travel costs, hotel costs and subsistence costs are non-existent
4. Time away from the office is reduced meaning reduced impact on operations
5. Reduced lag time between learning and application

It’s not just about the cost savings since points 4 and 5 above provide efficiency gains, making a company more agile – another need-to-have in an environment of increasing competition.

If ever you thought that e-Learning was worth further investigation, now is the ideal time.

I’m pleased to report that we’ve just released 14 more courses for the benefit of companies using our outsourced e-Learning service.

6 of these come from Prime Learning’s PrimeFinance curriculum. The curriculum was designed to “demystify finance and to remove financial phobias” and is aimed primarily at non-financial managers. The courses are challenging but rewarding and cover much of what would be covered in a university finance course.

The other 8 courses come from the PrimeProject Management Fundamentals curriculum, again from Prime Learning. These courses give learners fantastic Project Management know-how and will be of huge value particularly to those responsible for quantifying project cost and resource requirements. I thoroughly enjoyed these courses given their interactive nature. Each one in the series builds on knowledge provided by its predecessor so learners would do well to do them in order (as with all the Prime Learning courses).

Next up? Team Building skills!

The first International Conference on e-Learning in the Workplace (ICELW) was held at the university of Columbia in New York City over the 12th and 13th of June this year. It attracted over a hundred delegates from all over the globe including Sweden, Norway, Singapore, Australia, England, and America. Bridgewater was there too, representin’.

There were two very distinct flavours to the proceedings. The first was the focus on a concept called “Performance Support” while the second was the growing realisation that e-Learning is best implemented as part of a blended learning plan.

The conference’s keynote speaker, Gary Dickelman from EPSScentral, opened the proceedings with a talk on Performance Support. If you’re a little unsure about what this really means, you aren’t alone. Performance support is gathering momentum as a balancing force against training for training’s sake.

As Dickelman put it, there are two ways to achieve competency at work: Increase skills, knowledge and abilities (SKAs) through training, or reduce the complexity of what needs to be done. This latter concept is the basis for Performance Support which is not mutually exclusive of training but, according to Dickelman, should be considered more often than is currently the case.

The main idea is to provide support for the worker at the time it’s required. Performance support may then be likened to “just-in-time” learning. As an example, if you have workers that need to use an IT system to produce some output, their performance may be improved by a combination of usability design and on-demand intelligent help systems. His argument was then that training would achieve best results if, instead of training users on every nuance of the system, users were rather trained to interact with the help system to help themselves in time of need.

The camps of specialists at the conference were clearly divided on this topic, however. Opponents of Performance Support cited the many difficulties in measuring where to apply improvement efforts and slated Performance Support experts for keeping their methods very close to their chests; as well they might – professional Performance Support consultants are few and far between and charge a small fortune for their expertise. Those in the training camp also blamed the Performance Support group for being overly forceful in applying their crafts since Performance Support implementations were said to often raise the price of achieving the objective and were not always necessary. Such are the politics at academic conferences!

Politics aside, the best advice might be as our mothers tell us: “everything in moderation” – a combination of process improvement along with training may be the way to achieve best results.

Another balance of two processes featured in the second theme of the conference, that of blending face-to-face training with e-Learning. E-Learning, as we know, holds many efficiency and cost saving benefits but has been criticised for being too impersonal. What results is hard-nosed business driving for e-Learning and learners themselves asking for more personal interaction.

Since the learners are the ones who determine eventual uptake of e-Learning is was suggested by many that a blended approach be used. One such approach that resonated was the use of a face-to-face session to open a course, followed by self-study e-Learning to cover the bulk of knowledge intake (supported by written communication between learners and facilitators) and another face-to-face session to close (a so-called “Book-end blend”). This enables learners to form an association with others in the same position as themselves, reducing the feeling of loneliness and allowing them to share experiences, while leveraging e-Learning’s efficiencies. The closing sessions enable the facilitators to round off the training more effectively and retrieve much needed feedback.

Other themes to the proceedings included Web 2.0 tools for knowledge sharing and collaboration in support of learning, the importance of integrating learning with performance reviews, case studies versus simulations as teaching tools and strategic use of e-Learning in the workplace.

One topic that was noticeably absent was mobile learning, which has great potential in the South African market given that our population has around 10% internet access relative to near 80% cell phone access. As cell phone screen sizes increase (see the new Apple iPhone rumoured to be landing on our shores soon) we may yet see an increase in m-Learning, as it’s called. Perhaps a paper on that subject would be worth presenting at next year’s conference?

Submissions are currently being requested for ICEWL 2009. Check their website for more info: www.icelw.org.

I hope to see some more South Africans at next year’s conference!

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We partnered with Ireland-based Prime Learning a few months ago and recently released the first batch of courses from them. Their content is conveniently arranged into curricula so not only are there singular courses but many have been combined to form more rounded training in a particular subject or discipline.

We’ve spent the last few weeks reviewing their content and preparing it for our service and I’m happy to report that their content is excellent. Many of the courses immerse you as the learner in the subject matter through scenarios in which you are required to make decisions on which path to follow. Based on your decisions you are presented with varying information pertinent to your choice. This makes the learning both fun and more engaging.

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Excel 2007 has now been added to the range of courses. Including the new ribbon feature common across the Office 2007 products the new interface can be a bit confusing to those who’ve used Excel 2003 or earlier releases. Have no fear! This course covers the ribbon in depth and will reacquaint you with all your favourite tools.

This particular course is extremely thorough and covers everything from the basics, past formulae and functions all the way up to importing data from databases using queries. A more rounded course on Excel you couldn’t find.

A particularly nice feature of this particular course is that the author has taken the time to create working Excel files that learners can use to practice what they’re seeing performed onscreen.

Give us a shout to get your staff access to this course.