Category: Content Services

How eLearning is Creating Organization Leaders and Future CEOs?

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Unlocking employee capabilities have become a challenge for organizations across the world. With growing emphasis on evolving future leaders from the organization rather than hiring from outside, the need to train, retain and educate employees is great one. And to accomplish this goal, companies are no longer taking the road of traditional education and training programs.

 

eLearning has gained acceptance in the corporate by proving its effectiveness in evolving organization leaders and future CEOs without impacting operational efficiency. Here is how eLearning solutions are helping brands prepare employees for future roles:

 

By improving lesson engagement

It is known fact that traditional mediums of instruction doesn’t appeal to working professionals. Employees are equally resistive of training sessions organized outside workplace which are also a big drain in company resources. eLearning driven training methodologies on the other hand capitalizes on visual, audio and interactive content to make the audience pay attention and retain lessons. This means learning in an open and relaxed environment.

 

By providing targeted training content

Books, notes, and other forms of lengthy literature rarely work for working professionals. What they need is highly targeted content tailored to workforce requirements. eLearning has made this possible for organizations across the globe. Corporate content solution providers compress training material, and offer it to employees in interactive media which can be consumed in small digitally powered sessions, and independently as well. Employee productivity and performance based sessions also give better results this way.

 

By making sessions interactive

eLearning has given more power in the hands of educators and trainers. They can plan interactive sessions to ensure better understanding and mind recall. This is crucial for employees, considering most of them no longer feel comfortable sitting in a classroom like environment. Interactive sessions tailored as per audience’s training needs can lead to enhanced learning. And this is exactly what employers need to build future CEOs.

 

By offering practical learning solutions

Companies often struggle with time and cost variables when it comes to training workforce. This is especially true for small and mid size businesses. eLearning eliminate this limitation by offering cost-effective technology driven solutions.

 

Another big advantage that eLearning solutions bring is flexibility. All the above listed factors help organizations put in place training machinery that improve productivity as well as overall performance. This is the reason why small as well as global brands are embracing technology driven training solutions over traditional ones.

 

Check out services frequently deployed by businesses for internal training and employee growth.

4 Creative Ways to Increase Learning Effectiveness

Posted on by aashish-dev

We live in one of the most interesting and challenging business environments the world has ever known. To keep up with the shifting trends and to come up with innovative solutions to new problems, many companies spend billions of dollars on employee education and corporate training programs. However, according to one research, many of these programs don’t work.

 

The problem is that some of the most common strategies for retaining knowledge are outdated and not very effective. To increase the learning effectiveness of your corporate training programs, you need to get your employees on board with new ideas and make them eager to learn. That’s often easily said than done.

 

To help you foster a culture of continuous erudition, here are four creative methods of increasing learning effectiveness.

 

1. Offer Bite-Sized Learning Opportunities

Pressed by urgent tasks and always on-the-go, employees don’t want to sit through a two-hour eLearning course to get the information they need. Instead, you can create short educational videos that they can access on their computers or smartphones anytime, anywhere. To make this type of corporate training effective, it’s paramount to have bite-sized chunks of information readily available to your employees so they can be accessed on demand.

 

2. Design an eLearning Program

Easily accessible and effective, eLearning programs can be a valuable asset, especially under time and budget constraints. More than that, thanks to Gamification, engagement and retention are improved. And it’s not just Gamification. Employers can use various sophisticated learning tools to match aptitudes with the learning goals achieved by employees.

 

3. Get Your Employees Involved by Placing Them in the Role of the Instructor

Switching roles and allowing the student to become the teacher is another great way of absorbing information and increasing learning effectiveness. Encourage your employees to explore a topic on their own and express important ideas in their words. Invite them to create blog posts, podcasts or presentations that explore a new topic.

 

4. Encourage Collaborative Learning

There are numerous online tools, such as Google Chrome Apps or social media platforms you can use to enable collaboration, even among remote employees. For instance, you can assign them a group task and ask them to complete the task exclusively through online group work. This is an excellent way for team members to learn and retain new information.

There is no question that employee development can give a business a competitive edge. Using these tips, you can increase the learning effectiveness of your corporate training programs and also give your employees the chance to benefit from the knowledge acquired.

Blended Learning: The Future

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Considering the buzz that blended learning could be the future of higher education, Imperial College London is experimenting with its teaching methodology by offering on-line courses for their engineering students as a supplement for their classroom-based learning. It seems like the students have hooked on to this model of advanced learning. If this online learning model succeeds, the college may extend and replicate this model to other disciplines like business, science and medicine. When the MOOC movement was really threatening, it looks like this model will bring back the interest in print books along with the online supplement. I’m sure a lot of people will view it with interest, and this idea may get replicated elsewhere. Wishing the college all the very best.

 

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2016/01/29/blended-learning-the-future-of-higher-education/#619fa68e2708

Blended Learning: The Future Of Higher Education?

Universities have long been wrestling with the internet. On the one hand it represents a huge opportunity, in the shape of an enormous resource and new methods of delivery; on the other it represents a huge threat, in the shape of an enormous resource and new methods of delivery.

Big data is not a fad for publishers anymore

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Publishers today are beginning to understand that Big Data is not a fad. They have started leveraging it in their business to stay ahead of the curve and to be competitive, more so when dealing with authors, agents, and retailers. Now with clear data about an author’s success rate and detailed understanding of his/her strengths in a particular genre, acquisition of new titles has become smarter.

 

Not just this, publishers now have a say with retailers on the placement of books on the shelves based on data compared to how retailers were calling the shots until a few years ago. Social media is now seriously being viewed by publishers as a data source on consumer buying behaviors and trends. In higher education Big Data provides great insights into student interaction with subjects and can provide decisive intervention with digital learning enhancements.

 

For more details, check out articles at

http://bit.ly/24quwo2

Hot New Technology Learning Trends for Successful Corporate Training

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One of the biggest mistakes that learning professionals make in delivering content is operating under the assumption that there is nothing new under the sun. To put it another way, they already know everything they need to know about creating training materials for organizations and how it should be delivered. However, this type of thinking can be detrimental in the future.

 

In the past few years, a cumulative effort of research and development in the learning industry has revealed several trends that will impact the learning strategies to be used. In particular, the exponential advancements in technology have allowed for these strategies to become viable choices for delivering content.

 

Gamified Learning

Do you remember your younger years when you dreaded the thought of doing 5 minutes of homework, yet you could get endlessly lost in a fun video game for 5 hours? Well, science has investigated why these games keep us hooked, and reaches have applied what they discovered into creating an effective learning method. Using the same techniques used by game designers that include immediate feedback and the permission to fail without any feelings of guilt or shame, learning professionals can make their materials equally engaging. Technology will allow for gamification principles to be incorporated into electronic learning courses and encourage the learning process.

 

Community-Based Learning

Applications such as Lift or Coach.me have successfully embraced the idea of learning new things with an interactive community that is accessible at the touch of a fingertip. Learners will not only have access to other students but to the teachers for discussion of ideas and clarification on any questions they might have. Thanks to the advent of technology, communication between students and teachers will be instant and seamless in nature.

 

Customized Learning

If there is one thing that learning professionals will always agree on, it is that each person is individual in their learning style, and the speed at which they can process information. However, traditional methods do not allow for this as they are rigidly stuck with a “teacher-classroom” paradigm. Electronic learning has taken advantage of individual preferences by having users input their strengths and weaknesses in a given subject. Adjustments in the progression and difficulty of the material can be done by a supervising teacher or an algorithm that is designed for the course.

 

Whether learning professionals will choose to incorporate one of the above trends or all of them in their educational materials, it is important to remember that trends are not arrived upon by accident. They are the result of gradual changes in society and continuous discovery of novel observations in the learning industry. If you are a learning professional and you want to know what the new trends are going to be, heed this sage advice from Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

Leveraging Technology for Flexible Employee Learning

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When it comes to training employees within a modern organization, it is important to consider how trends are changing. In particular, workers and leaders are not learning in the same way they did in the past. Gone are the days of compact classrooms and a teacher monotonously going through PowerPoint slides that appear to be put together at the last minute. In this day and age, people prefer to learn at their own rate using the technology that they have at hand. Instead of a 500-page binder full of dense information, workers are becoming adapted to materials that are available to them on any platform, at any time.

 

The fact of the matter is that companies are not fully leveraging the technologies available to them in order to deliver training materials that are designed to achieve business goals and objectives. Executives and high-powered leaders know that employee learning will result in improved talent overall, which in turn will lead to company growth. In order to fully leverage technology such that employees will receive the maximum benefit from it, three things need to be done:

 

1) Availability on Electronic & Mobile Platforms

With an increasing number of employees using tablets and cellphones, many learning industries are quickly catching on to the fact that there will be a stronger preference for learning materials to be available on mobile platforms. By offering content that can be viewed on computers, phones, and tablets simultaneously, employees get a choice and flexibility in browsing through the content and a wide variety of learning preferences are catered for.

 

2) Customization for Relevance & Learning Preferences

In addition to flexibility with respect to the medium through which content is delivered, there is a strong preference for training materials that cater to the individual’s needs AND their learning preferences. What is relevant to one employee will not be relevant to another, and so an individualized approach saves time through the inclusion of relevant material, and the exclusion of irrelevant training. As for learning preferences, some people prefer to go through the slides on their own as auditory learners while others prefer to have the content delivered in a video presentation as visual learners.

 

3) Actionable Steps

When all of the above has been said and done, the chances of success are improved when there are actions provided with the training materials that will assist in absorbing what is learned. In other words, performance improves from doing what is taught instead of passively measuring it. For best results, include the action steps at the end of each educational session so that learners will have time to implement the materials.

 

With an ever-increasing amount of information in the modern age and several technology mediums through which to customize and deliver it, it would be foolish not to take advantage of these options. Your workers’ performance and the future of your company depend on it!

The Challenge in Text Permissions

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Content Services 2012: The Challenge in Text Permissions

In publishing, imitation is definitely not the best form of flattery. In fact, using another person’s work—be it a small paragraph or an obscure quote—without proper permission may lead to copyright litigation.

The first, and most critical, step in rights clearance is determining what resides in the public domain and what does not. To put it simply, one can quote Shakespeare’s plays without obtaining permission or pay any fees, unless one quotes lines from a specific edition published by a certain publishing house.

But when it comes to works by, say, e.e. cummings or Jack Kerouac, clearance is required, unless one wants to invite infringement suits.

To Script or to plug-in

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Publishers, worldwide, have accepted InDesign over the years as a worthy tool in their arsenal. One of the main reasons for InDesign’s acceptance is its design capabilities and scope for automation in a world that demands extremely short TATs and cost efficiencies.

 

Automation in InDesign can either be done from a high-level approach with supported scripts or diving deep into the InDesign SDK and develop a native plug-in. Both approaches have their advantages and limitations.

 

Let’s look at the easier option of scripting first. InDesign offers great support for scripting. Creating and running a script in InDesign is relatively inexpensive, easier for the programmers, and has a short turnaround time to develop. One can say that almost all of InDesign’s functionalities can be evoked through the ExtendScript Toolkit. For these reasons, a faction of developers go the script road rather than develop a plug-in. Scripts can be used for simple tasks like how a macro functions and also for complex tasks that improve performance.

 

InDesign evolved and with the introduction of the Script UI. Scripts could be run in the background and could be run in interfaces involving dynamic input. With Script UI, scripting embraced greater functionality and could dream of scaling up to plug-ins’ capabilities. However, scripting can be used only to automate existing functionalities and plug-ins allow developers to create new functionalities and create value in situations where high performance is vital.

 

For this reason, a segment of developers swear by plug-ins and take the time and pain in deep level coding that allows them access to InDesign’s core architecture. While InDesign’s SDK is extensive and requires a deep understanding of C++, standard libraries, and software patterns the benefits outweigh the effort involved. Plug-ins can create newer functionalities and offer seamless integration in high-critical areas.

 

The question then arises, “What should a publisher and their supplier choose to leverage their automation processes?” There is no universal solution. The journey continues and each software engineering team has to create their own solution to meet their custom needs. To script or develop a plug-in for extending functionalities — that’s for the customer’s needs to decide.