Learning Beyond the Course (eLN event)

Once again I have been lucky enough to attend a fantastic CPD event in the shape of todays eLN event – Learning Beyond the Course.

@RobHubbard was our compère for the day, decked out as usual in a gloriously flowery shirt

(where do you get them from Rob?)

In line with my previous Blog post ‘Small Chunks‘ I was committed to taking away 1 Action Planning point per session that I could actually do something with back in my organisation.

Here we go…

Ben Betts – And Now For Something Completely Different…

If you’ve ever wondered what you can do with a paper clip, a stick, some constraint and a carrot then you’ll be gutted that you missed Ben’s session. But ‘cos he’s a good bloke he’s blogged about it in some detail here.

Which leads me to my action planning point(s)

Try and sweet-talk Ben into sending me the game that he kicked his session off with (very clever and innovative)Read Daniel Pink’s Drive (Ben referenced this several times and as we have it sat in our library it makes sense to have a look)

Graeme Duncan – Breaking Down Barriers: The Ubiquitous Delivery of Thin Client Immersive Simulations

I’ll be the first to admit that the title of this session was more than a little off-putting when I read about this event on the eLN website, but once I realised that we were going to be ‘virtually’ running around a Type 22 RN frigate, putting out fires and catching saboteurs I was hooked! It was certainly enlightening  to hear that Caspian Learning have been creating some realistic virtual environments for some VERY security-conscious clients…. interesting…

Log into Thinking Worlds and request a demoInvite Graeme into my organisation to demo Thinking Worlds.

Ed Stonestreet – Not eLearning

Ed reminded us that the elearning industry is worth $10bn and is almost without exception dull, dry and academic. As I work within a highly-regulated Industry I could certainly relate to Ed’s point that it is focussed on those who have a mandate to learn, those who need to tick a box. Apparently only 20% of any audience is motivated and inspired to act, the other 80% may have a latent interest but they need to be engaged, entertained and wowed in order to get them to participate. How can this be done….? Well Ed went on to explain in not so many words the Affective Context model, which I aren’t going to attempt to explain here, instead I’ll direct you towards Nick Shackleton-Jones blog.

Ed made such a good job of raising the issue of ‘engagement’ and ‘interest raising’ that I am going to direct our internal Learning Facilitators towards the Affective Context model video.Review the YooDoo tool that Ed is involved in.

Rob had promised us an excellent lunch and Holborn Bars certainly didn’t disappoint!!!

Following lunch we had 3 great Pecha Kucha presentations, I’ve come to realise that these appear to be a staple element of an eLN event and I look forward to seeing them; who knows I may even present one at the November event (if anybody from the eLN board is reading this, that wasn’t a formal commitment!)

Jane Hart – Transforming Workplace Learning with Social Media

Jane Hart – Transforming Workplace Learning with Social Media

It was great to see Jane Hart again after lunch as the last time we met was at a Twitter workshop that she ran back in the Spring at the Informatology conference. Jane (as always) did a great job of proving the power of Twitter as a crowd-sourcing tool by calling upon her Twitter followers to respond to various questions that she was ‘auto-tweeting’ during her presentation. I was quite surprised to discover how few people in the immediate audience were Twitter users, although this is a pattern that I have noticed emerging at the IITT conference and the eLN showcase…. I wonder why….?

Patrick Fitzpatrick – Living in a World Without ‘Click Next to Continue’

Patrick addressed an issue that I have been working on for sometime in my organisation which is “how can my learners progress through a piece of elearning’ without a next button on the screen. He had some great examples of using visuals to act as menu screens, which mirrors an approach I have taken with a Display Screen Equipment awareness package.  This visual approach seemed to split the audience into 2 groups; those that ‘got it’ and those that thought that introducing a ‘fun’, visual component was a distraction and on some occasions set a false impression of how dull, boring and repetitive working life can be

Patrick made a great reference to the level of elearning interaction over the years:

Yesterdays elearning = dictationTodays elearning = investigationTomorrows elearning = exploration (hopefully!)

So what were my action planning points?

Continue the work I am doing on removing the next button from my elearning module and then…publicise this to the remaining elearning authors to show them that it ‘is’ possible.

Throughout the day the entire conference had taken the form of a crossword/wordsearch/game of battleships which I thought was really innovative and brought an interesting element to the event, my only concern with taking this approach was that I (and perhaps my learners) would be so distracted by the gaming element that the learning could suffer… not something I’m instantly dismissing though, and as with the rest of the day has provided food for thought….

View the original article here

"Ergonomics" training course: living in harmony with your screen!

  More and more of us are spending time in front of a computer screen. For some people, the average is one or two hours a day, but for others it’s practically the whole day. Not to mention what happens when we get home…

Sitting correctly at your screen-based workstation is not just a question of comfort.

Back or neck pain, sore wrists, eye strain, stress... these are just some of the problems that can arise over the short to medium term.

The likelihood of such problems can be reduced by adjusting your workstation, its position or the organisation of your workload, which can be defined as part of a detailed evaluation of your personal situation.

However, there are a few simple actions we can take ourselves.

With this in mind, the HSE Unit invites you to attend the “Ergonomics” training course, which is aimed at everyone who works in front of a screen.

Combining theory and practical exercises over the course of half a day, this training session covers essential topics such as:

The risks associated with working in front of a screen (anatomy and problems);Preventive measures (ergonomic organisation of the workstation, positioning, equipment);Strengthening and relaxation exercises.

The course description and registration form can be found in the training catalogue on the Safety Training Service’s website or can be consulted directly here. 

Sign up now! You won’t see working in front of a screen in the same light again!

More information about screen-based workstations here. 

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions concerning:

 

View the original article here

"Ergonomics" training course: living in harmony with your screen!

  More and more of us are spending time in front of a computer screen. For some people, the average is one or two hours a day, but for others it’s practically the whole day. Not to mention what happens when we get home…

Sitting correctly at your screen-based workstation is not just a question of comfort.

Back or neck pain, sore wrists, eye strain, stress... these are just some of the problems that can arise over the short to medium term.

The likelihood of such problems can be reduced by adjusting your workstation, its position or the organisation of your workload, which can be defined as part of a detailed evaluation of your personal situation.

However, there are a few simple actions we can take ourselves.

With this in mind, the HSE Unit invites you to attend the “Ergonomics” training course, which is aimed at everyone who works in front of a screen.

Combining theory and practical exercises over the course of half a day, this training session covers essential topics such as:

The risks associated with working in front of a screen (anatomy and problems);Preventive measures (ergonomic organisation of the workstation, positioning, equipment);Strengthening and relaxation exercises.

The course description and registration form can be found in the training catalogue on the Safety Training Service’s website or can be consulted directly here. 

Sign up now! You won’t see working in front of a screen in the same light again!

More information about screen-based workstations here. 

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions concerning:

 

View the original article here

From Compliance Course To Campaign, Part 1 – The Background

There’s been a great desk of chatter recently about compliance training. Actually, maybe it’s no more than usual, perhaps I’m just sensitive to it at the moment.

Why so?

Well because since the beginning of 2013 I have been working to revamp our mandatory compliance training offering from 2 perspectives

1. Is the content technically correct (fear naught Dear Reader, I’m passing the buck on this one to the SME)

2. Is the method and media we are using the most likely to positively effect behavioural change (this is where I swing into action!)

Our current mandatory training is offered via traditional ‘click-next, self-paced’ eLearning delivered via our LMS and covers the following subjects

Data Matters

Manual Handling

Display Screen Equipment (DSE) awareness

Risk Assessment

Health & Safety (H&S) Induction

Diversity (I’m still arguing the toss as to whether Diversity training is mandatory or not and I have some interesting researched kindly surfaced by Donald Clark that suggests even if it is, that it’s not proven to effect any positive change)

Financial Crime Prevention

Privacy and Confidentiality

Treating Customers Fairly (TCF)

My plan is to adopt a campaign not course approach for each of these subjects, which (in my head) seems a logical and effective thing to do, all I have to do is convince the compliance department….

…. and you know what….

I have!!!

Keep on reading this series of posts to discover how I managed to get the SMEs/sponsors buy in, ascertain what we wanted, engaged with suppliers and (in the fullness of time) the end result!

View the original article here

From Compliance Course to Campaign Part 3 – Getting outside help

If you haven’t read this series to date it may be worthwhile doing so in order to set the context for this post…

Once I’d won the SMEs over (I’m still pinching myself to be honest) I invited 3 x local vendors to come and meet with me to discuss my idea and to see if they would be interested in participating in the procurement process. This was a huge advantage for both sides as it:

allowed me to sense check my ideas and proposed approachprovided the vendors with an opportunity to take a brief look around my organisation, observe some of the resources and channels that we currently use (and may well use to communicate the campaign resources) and ascertain whether they felt we could work together.

I’m pleased to say that at this stage all 3 vendors were keen to work with us and all of them commented on how refreshing it was to see a traditional subject such as compliance training having a radically different approach taken to it.

Having previously worked as a vendor I understood the complications and ‘quirks’ that can be associated with a tender process, so I was very keen (from both perspectives) to own a process that was as transparent, fair and simple as possible. Rather than wrestle with (or expect others to) the typical procurement portals that are often the bane of a vendors life I decided to use Google Docs (I can’t get into the habit of calling it Google Drive) to write and communicate my Request for Proposal (RfP) through.

This had the advantage of being:

freesimple to usemobile friendlyable to allow each of the vendors to ask any questions ‘within’ the document, thus negating the need for a procurement portal and allowing each of the vendors to see each others questions – and of course my responses – thus keeping the process as fair and transparent as possible.

Several of the vendors said that they seldom saw GDocs being used in this way and were welcoming of the approach.

In terms of what I included in my RfP I used a great deal of the advice contained in this post from Stephanie Dedhar along with my own previous experience as a vendor

Once I’d released the GDoc RfP I set up a f2f meeting at our offices to:

allow each of the vendors to come inask further questions in an open forumand also to provide them with another opportunity to look at some of our existing comms channels etc.

Again, the feedback I got from this was very positive with one of the vendors saying that it helped to confirm their interpretation of the RfP and removed any ambiguity.

At that point I:

sat backanswered questionsarranged some access to some of our portalsconducted a few Adobe Connect session to explain our internal collaborative platform to some of the vendorswaited…..

I did learn some lessons along the way with this approach, here they are:

Get your potential providers in early, way before you write the RfP – the conversation will inevitably help you shape your thinking.No matter how long you provide people with the opportunity to respond, somebody will be late.Include a ‘please let us know if you intend to submit a proposal by xyz date’ request. I didn’t, and as a result had a vendor drop out with only 1 week to go until final submission, despite having the best part of 2 months visibility of the project scope!!!

Keep on reading this series of posts to discover what happened after we’d received the proposals and what I’m calling the ‘end of the beginning‘

If you’d like to discuss how we may be able to work together to bring about a fundamental change in the way your organisation delivers its mandatory training or would like to advise on how you can maximise the effectiveness of your next tender process then please get in touch.

View the original article here