We've had a marked increase in requests for help to create eLearning solutions for clients in industry. While eLearning has been used for some aspects of industry training for more than a decade, particularly for health and safety and compliance training, there has been growing acceptance of eLearning as a method of training for more diverse knowledge and skills.
We know the feeling – you’ve worked on your eLearning project for weeks, finally it’s been signed off and gone live in your LMS. Major milestone achieved! Then, someone tells you that a section of content needs to be updated, and it feels like starting all over again.
Babson SRG have released the results of surveying 2500 Chief Academic Officers from U.S. tertiary institutions. What we found interesting is:
Synapsys staff and our premises are all fine after the recent aftershock in Christchurch.
‘Learning culture’ and ‘learning organisation’ are terms that have been around for a long time. They conjure up different reactions from different people; some consider them aspirational, others see them as expensive and ethereal, still others see them as central to their organisation's competitive advantage.
Generally, when we work with a client interested in a print-based product, this is a general summary of the process Synapsys uses to make sure that we, and our client, understand our various roles and that the finished product satisfies the client’s needs.
This report (4MB) from the Babson Survey Research Group makes interesting reading on the uptake of online learning in higher education in the U.S. Thirty-one percent of all higher education students now take at least one course online.
Here is an interview with the authors of a new book, Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever. The book expands on Marc Prensky's digital natives/digital immigrants message with a profound wake-up call about the ways in which games have changed a whole generation of employees. It also seeks to dispel myths and clarify many assumptions about gamers, including the myth that gamers are loners:
Over the last few years we have seen the percentage of requests for print-based learning reduce significantly in favour of online learning delivery. On more than one occasion, we are presented with a volume of hard copy material and asked to turn it into an online learning course. The most effective outcome can’t be achieved by just making a change to the writing style, nor is it simply a question of rewriting the material as a web page. The opportunity exists not just to take the material to online delivery, but to give the learners a whole new experience and influence their long term behaviour. So how do we know if the eLearning we do produce measures up to this challenge?
A year of earthquakes has changed us, in some ways for the better. We never made it back into our base in historic High Street after the February quake. Life really has been about making do and finding new ways to work.