Posts Tagged ‘lms’

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.

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.

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!

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.

E-learning course creation [video]

This video shows off how an e-learning course can be created right in the web browser with Notion Learning.

The key benefits of e-learning

We make no secret of going on about the many benefits of e-learning but it’s always interesting to keep up on the latest research into the area. Towards Maturity has a piece up on their site pointing to a new piece of research from Becta titled Delivering results with learning technology in the workplace. The investigation centred across a number of themes which learning technologies deliver benefits on:

1. Time Saving
2. Productivity Gains
3. Staff Benefit
4. Business Impact
5. Tangible quality improvement for learning
6. Impact of Social Learning
7. Green Issues
8. Cost Savings

The report itself is well worth diving into (all 76 pages) and the links to a large number of case studies at the end of the document are also worth looking at.

We firmly believe in the business benefits of e-learning, and if we can deliver on our goal of delivering a low cost platform, then we can only add to the benefits seen above.