Upgrade

We’re upgrading the whole site right now. (Hint: To bring the whole design in line with this blog redesign and more…) We’ll be back up as soon as possible.

Update: We’re back! With a brand new homepage!

The Cloud and you

A great article was posted yesterday on the BBC News web site entitled Cloud computing for business goes mainstream. It serves as a great introduction to what cloud computing is all about. Worth highlighting are the five key benefits outlined in the article:

1. Cheap: your IT provider will host services for multiple companies; sharing complex infrastructure is cost-efficient and you pay only for what you actually use.
2. Quick: The most basic cloud services work out of the box; for more complex software and database solutions, cloud computing allows you to skip the hardware procurement and capital expenditure phase – it’s perfect for start-ups.
3. Up-to-date: Most providers constantly update their software offering, adding new features as they become available.
4. Scaleable: If your business is growing fast or has seasonal spikes, you can go large quickly because cloud systems are built to cope with sharp increases in workload.
5. Mobile: Cloud services are designed to be used from a distance, so if you have a mobile workforce, your staff will have access to most of your systems on the go.

These benefits form the basis of Notion Learning, a true cloud based learning system. Also worth pointing out is how this architecture helps dispel an old problem in e-learning; that of e-learning deployment taking a huge amount of time. The truth is with these advancements, and cloud based tools like Notion, we can finally leave behind that old idea of e-learning = costly, lengthy deployment. It’s a little extreme, but let’s not forget that we recently showed how to build and deploy an e-learning course in 2 minutes and 52 seconds.

Blog redesigned

You are looking at the shiny re-design of the Notion Learning blog. It plays into the redesign of www.notionlearning.com, but you won’t see that until we’re closer to launch, which is getting closer and closer. Any comments, problems or suggestions drop us a line at info@notionlearning.com.

The killer e-learning loop

So much is made of the complexities of e-learning management, but really it comes down to a few key elements. We fully subscribe to the KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid!) methodology, so we’ve decided to drop in some posts on the absolute core of e-learning and what (should) make it great. One of them we’ve named ‘the killer e-learning loop‘ – excuse the parlance, but it really is one of the most important features e-learning systems should bring to the table. To a learning technologies professional, it should be the most obvious thing in the world – but to the rest of us it’s worth examining in a bit more detail. Cue diagram:

The whole point of learning management is to automate – but in so many systems this automation is a pain to setup. We’ve streamlined the experience in Notion Learning, so the above can all be done from one screen once the e-learning material is prepared. So creating a group, setting up the courses that will be assigned to it, bulk uploading a list (created in Excel or anything else that can save CSV files) and then fast processing of that file so hundreds of learners can be enrolled in minutes – it’s all really quick and easy. Because we’re not stupid, but we love to keep it simple.

IMC report: Learning Management Systems –are organisations making the most of them?

A good set of data has been released by IMC (UK) Learning Ltd. and is available as a PDF download here: Learning Management Systems –are organisations making the most of them? Even just the overview section is worth taking a look at if you are considering an LMS / VLE or are interested in comparing your own experience with the data presented.

Upgrade

Notion Learning is going down for the day for a major upgrade ahead of our beta release.

Update: And we’re back… and that’s another major step closer to launch…

An e-learning course created and deployed in 2 minutes 52 seconds [video]

This video is a bit of a departure: Given all the talk about rapid e-learning development and as promised in our previous post, we thought it might be fun to do a speed test of some of Notion Learning’s functionality. The result? The creation and deployment of a powerpoint based e-learning course in 2 minutes 52 seconds. It’s quite quick, so don’t worry if things are happening a bit too fast!

Rapid e-learning development

Notion Learning is a rapid e-learning tool – I did a speed test last week (and will hopefully share it with everyone in a video quite soon) and managed to upload a powerpoint presentation, combine it with some audio narration and then deploy it to a student in 2 minutes and 52 seconds. No really. So whereas a lot of people use the term rapid quite loosely, around here we really mean it.

It’s good then, to see e-learning expert Clive Shephard put up a post titled Rapid e-learning is gaining ground. Some really interesting information in the post so I recommend taking a read.

The move to in-house course creation is on

Some interesting outcomes reported by Omniplex after a survey conducted at the Learning Techonlogies 2010 conference earlier this year include the following:

“One priority was people looking to migrate from an existing learning management system (LMS) to a system that is easier to use,” revealed Matthew Lloyd, managing director of Omniplex.
“This reflects the trend towards organisations taking control of their LMS in-house – along with the trend to develop their own e-learning materials in-house, which has boosted demand for such things as rapid authoring tools which can be used by in-house subject matter experts rather than by professional e-learning designers and developers.

This is exactly our focus. We empower companies to build the content themselves – and it’s all included in our monthly rate. You get the LMS and all the tools you need to create content right in the web browser. And being easy to use is one of our main mantras.

Read the full report from omniplex. I found it mentioned in the current edition of e.learning age magazine.

The moodle issue

You can’t walk very far in the learning technologies industry without bumping into moodle. Whenever we start talking about our system we often get the response:

But what about moodle?

I’m going to leave the answer to that for another post, but as a bit of background to this issue, take a look at a post by Donald Clark, entitled Moodle: e-learning’s Frankenstein. A fantastic introduction to the evolution of e-learning’s most simultaneously loved and hated son.