Best Practice Guides

People have always felt the need to express themselves and cave paintings are arguably the earliest blogs. We now have tens of millions of blogs on what is the biggest, most exciting, expanding cave we have ever seen – the web. Blogs are unashamedly honest and personal. It is this that makes them so readable but of what relevance are blogs to learning? This new White Paper looks at the paradigm shift towards informal learning, blogs in business and blogs in learning (both formal and informal).

The military is a powerful and ever-present force in training, exploring avenues that are rarely tackled in other sectors. We all have a lot to learn from military training, especially from their research in leadership and team building but also in the use of simulations. They have a long history of using simulators and are now pioneering complex performance simulation. We are now entering a new era, with an emerging military-entertainment complex.

The NHS has huge training needs, exacerbated by skills shortages at all levels; huge recruitment leading to skills problems; lack of IT infrastructure; fragmentation and reorganisation; lack of sharing therefore duplication of effort. The potential solutions studied in this white paper could be applied to managers, physicians, health professionals, nurses and patients. It also looks at workplace health training.

Stephen Walsh explains how rapid e-learning design is different -- and better -- than traditional methods. Is there room for design in Rapid E-learning? You better believe it. In this free report, we share the three ways in which Rapid E-learning Design is different -- and better -- than traditional e-learning methods: (1) Where you start from: use structures and patterns to accelerate design; (2) How you get to release: get to first version quickly, iterate to release; (3) How you keep it relevant: wide range of tools, many of them free.

A recent review of UK competitiveness carried out by Harvard academic Professor Michael Porter, an expert in international competitiveness, points to significant improvements since the 1980s. Drawing on data from the Global Competitiveness Report of his Institute, he ranks the UK first in a comparative group of 23 nations that includes the US, France, Germany and Japan, for its further potential to increase GDP/capita. That's the good news. The not-so-good news is that he identifies a significant gap in management skills.

This free guide has been created specially by Joe Quilter of PSP learnix for the benefit of eLN members. It provides a host of practical tips and hints for the successful marketing within an organisation of elearning and blended learning programmes.

What are the benefits to an organisation of e-learning? Is it just a cut-price way of delivering training - or a means of facilitating new types of organisational learning that haven't been possible before? Where is the proof that e-learning can make any improvements on the traditional methods of classroom and workbook? And what role, if any, does it have to play in transforming an organisation to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century?

Good practice depends on good research. However, although the use of technology in learning has been around for several decades, there is still the feeling that little evidence based research exists to prove its effectiveness. The research seems difficult to find and fragmented, with no obvious authoritative sources. The common perception is that the use of technology in learning is largely unproven. Some would go as far as claiming that it hasn’t worked at all.

The term ‘soft skills’ is widely used in training, yet there are some key questions that need to be asked about its definition and how it can be taught and learnt: What are soft skills? Can soft skills be taught? How are soft skills best learnt? Do soft skill simulations work? Are there good soft skills e-learning case studies? What’s the future for soft skills in e-learning? We are now in a position to answer these questions by examining both theory and practice. There is now good evidence that sound soft skill simulations are proving effective in learning.