At this time of the year there are chocolate eggs everywhere. Are you tempted to try something new or do you put your trust in the same old thing every year?

When it comes to training many organisations seem to put all their eggs in one basket and classroom training is usually the default. That’s understandable – it’s what people are used to and no one has to stick their neck out and do something different. But most of our budgets are under pressure so perhaps it’s … Continue Reading

As Infographics are a bit of a guilty pleasure around here I thought I’d post some of my favourite Learning and e-learning infographics on the blog.  Here’s the first one by Nicole Legault 

It’s Anti-Bullying Week  so school children across the country are getting involved in activities to highlight how damaging bullying is and to help stamp it out. You can find resources for school aged children here:  Beat Bullying

Bullying in the workplace is also of course very damaging to adults and the organisations that they work in. In fact bullying is responsible for 30% – 50% of all stress-related illness in the workplace and costs employers up to £2 billion in lost revenue every year.

… Continue Reading

Not many of us would argue against the importance of management skills yet training is often one of the first cuts when budgets come under pressure.  Why should organisations still  invest in Management Skills?

We all know that good managers will get better performance, loyalty and innovation from their team. Senior managers know this too. So why do 43% of managers rate their own line management performance as lacking? Why are more businesses not investing sufficiently in management training? 

The Department of Business Innovation, Skills and Leadership Management Network Group (you can see … Continue Reading

e-learning’s a great way for organisations to keep up with training on regulatory or legislative courses as you can roll out new courses to everyone straight away at little or no cost. You can also of course check that your learners have completed it and passed the assessment. Take a look at this article for more reasons why Organisations are turning to e-learning: 10 Benefits of e-learning

For example, there have been some changes to the UK Asbestos regulations recently – … Continue Reading

Powerpoint is a really useful tool for creating quick graphics or to make simple changes to existing images.  We’ll be writing about a series of posts on this over the next few months to help you use Powerpoint for e-learning. You’ll also find these tips useful if you put together text-based training material or regularly use images in a blog for example.

In this post we’re going to focus on clip art.  A lot of clip art looks clunky and old fashioned but with a couple of minor changes you can often transform it into something that looks fresh and fits with the feel of your course. This can get complicated if … Continue Reading

I’ve came across a free course on e-learning accessibility that will be of interest to those developing  e-learning courses. It’s ‘masters’ level content from the Open University which is available as a free trial module on the OU’s Learning Space site.

The module is wide ranging but some of the key areas it covers are:

• Overview of Accessibility and disability.
• Different types of impairments
• Assistive technologies
• Reasonable adjustments (and avoiding disadvantaging non-disabled students)
• What to do when a learning objective can’t be achieved

To see the full content of the course and try it for yourself  follow this link: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3049

I came across this web accessibility infographic recently and, although it’s really written for web designers, it will be helpful for those of you developing e-learning too.  It’s from an organisation called Webaim and there’s lots of other useful stuff in the resources section of  their site so it’s worth taking a look if you want to make your e-learning more accessible. I found their Dyslexia simulation particularly interesting -  so if you want to find out what someone with Dyslexia might see when they look at a passage of text take a look here: Dyslexia Simulation and see how you fare reading the text…. Continue Reading

Happy World Book Day!

If you have school-age children you’ve probably been making something with them to take to school or dressing them up to celebrate World Book Day. My daughter’s school are having a hat competition and we had great fun making this hat inspired by ‘The Snail and The Whale’  by Julia Donaldson – it’s one of my favourite books to read to read to the kids.

Here’s some pics of our contribution:… Continue Reading

I would like to wish all of our customers, friends and visitors a Happy New Year!

I know a lot of people find this month a bit depressing but I’ve always loved January. A fresh start and a whole new year to look forward to, with all that that might bring.  

Although you could of course do it anytime,  the start of a new year encourages you to to reflect on the last 12 months and plan what you want to learn and achieve this year. What’s gone well, what didn’t and what do you need to improve on?  At home we also … Continue Reading