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 time to mix things up a bit and spread your risk?  Elearning or online training can reduce your costs, improve access to training and generally give you a lot more flexibility in your training plan. Here’s some Key Drivers for eLearning that our clients have shared with us.

Have a good Easter and I hope you all enjoy the long weekend. Don’t eat too many many eggs now!

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.

One of the most widely accepted ways of reducing the risk of bullying is to raise employee awareness and provide appropriate training on how to recognise and address it. Our online course, Preventing Bullying in the Workplace, can play an important part in your anti-bullying strategy by raising awareness and understanding about what constitutes bullying behaviour, what causes it and what can be done about it.

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 why they shorten it to LMNG) have produced an excellent report that looks at the evidence for  business performance and growth through good management skills. You can download the report here: LMNG Report: Leadership & Management in the UK – The Key To Sustainable Growth

The report states that some businesses don’t find management training very flexible in terms of  content or delivery and find it difficult to release staff. A separate CIPD report produced recently also indicated that many employers are clinging to outdated training methods. You can read their Learning & Talent Development report for more information.

e-learning and blended learning methods can help you do more management training with less money and in less time. For example Appraisal training can be delivered very effectively with e-learning and a workshop to practice scenerios and discuss key issues with other managers.

Is it time for you to look to more effective and flexible ways to train your managers?

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 – Control of Asbestos Risks 2012. We updated our Asbestos Awareness course to comply with the new regulations and our clients will receive this new course free of charge. It’s also very easy for them to roll out the training – no trainers to organise, no rooms to book, no budget authorisation required.

COSHH (Control of Substances Hazardous to Health)
Avoiding Bribery
DSE – Display Screen Equipment
Diversity, Equality & Discrimination
Data Protection Training
Lone Worker and Personal Safety

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 you have a very busy, multi-layered image and it’s a case of trial and error as you move things around to isolate the part of the image you want.

The following crayon example shows how a very simple change can update a graphic easily.

For example this crayon graphic looks a bit old fashioned to me. But, take away all the black and it looks much better. It takes less than a minute. I would save it to an image file format (like png) if I was using it in a course.

Take a look at this video to see how see another example:

Try it for yourself – here’s the steps

Steps
 1: Open a new PowerPoint and create a new blank slide.
2: Search clip art for ‘quote marks’ and insert in a blank PowerPoint slide
3: Right click the image and select “ungroup”
4. Pull the quote marks from the image (select them, click and drag off the main image). You can now delete all other parts of the image.
5. Right click on one of your quote marks and select format object. Select a new colour and ok. Repeat with the next quote mark.
6 Right click to save as picture (png file)

Need some more help? We provide one to one coaching and training courses on Powerpoint for e-learning. Get in touch to find out more – just click on the ’Request Callback’ button on the right.

Or try one of our e-learning courses to brush up on your general Powerpoint Skills  

• Introduction to Powerpoint course (available in versions 2000, 2007, 2010)  
• Advanced Powerpoint Course

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.

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:

I created a little book token for the school to give to the winners and thought it would be a good idea for Flow Learning to give away some book tokens (well, Amazon gift vouchers) to any customers who order one of our course bundles before the 8th March.  And there’s no need to make a special hat for it:-)

Here are the e-learning course bundles that are included in the offer:

• Health and Safety Bundle - A range of safety courses including Safe Manual Handling, Noise at Work, Risk Assessment, Asbestos Awareness and many more.

• Equality and Diversity Bundle - updated with the latest employment legislation changes.

• Business e-ssentials Bundle - includes negotiation, presentations, managing meetings, time management, appraisals, recruitment and selection and many more.

• Lone Worker and Personal Safety Bundle - four courses to help keep you or your staff safe when working or travelling on their own. Includes tips on handling agression in the workplace.

• Microsoft IT Skills Bundle - includes tutorials on all the main microsoft office products including Access, Word, Excel and Powerpoint and many others. Various versions up to 2010.

Hope you have time to get some reading in today…

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 like to write a list of all the fun things we’re going to do that we haven’t got round to yet – day trips, holidays and new things to try out.

If you haven’t written out your new year’s resolutions, goals for this year and your 2012 ‘bucket list’ of fun stuff yet – it’s not too late to find yourself a quiet corner and get planning…