The e-learning age has arrived

Our appetite for technology and trends in social media are all
signs that E-Learning has come of age, says Julian Roberts

Charlie Sheen has just been
entered in the Guinness World
Book of Records for attracting
1,000,000 followers in one day on
Twitter. 24 hours of video is uploaded
to You Tube every minute. Facebook
has over 500,000,000 active users.

People across the world spend over 700
billion minutes per month on
Facebook. These types of social media
may not be to all of our tastes, but these
statistics show that we as consumers are
starting to move our social interactions
online.

Health and safety training has been
available online for over 10 years. When it
first appeared on the scene it was viewed
as a poor relation to traditional face to face
training. However, one of the big
advantages of E-Learning has always been
its availability 24 hours a day from any
location with access to the internet. With
the government promising broadband and
faster download speeds in every UK home
by 2012, the internet is becoming the focus
for both business and social interactions.

As the internet matures, so technology
in turn develops and evolves to take
advantage of the advances that have been
made in recent years. The thought of
having a Wi-Fi enabled car would have
seemed like science fiction a few years
ago, but Audi has just launched Wi-Fi as
an option on some of its luxury models,
including Google maps built into the car.

And, of course, the Apple iPad has had a
huge impact with over 3,000,000 units sold
in the UK alone providing a true “internet
anywhere” experience. Mobile phones are
now basically mobile computers with
many boasting 1GHz processors which we
would have been happy with in our
desktop PC five years ago.

For us in the health & safety and
training industries, these advances mean
that we now have greater access to the
people that we want to educate and
inform. We are able to push rich
meaningful information to them through
their internet enabled devices, be it a
computer, a phone, a tablet or even their
car. This training does not need to be flat
and uninteresting, but can be interactive
and immersive ensuring that the receiver
is engaged in the training and retains the
knowledge through an enjoyable training
experience.

Embracing change
We need to embrace these new
technologies and think how they can help
us in our day to day lives. For example,
combining online employee risk
assessments with online training provides
both the end user with a meaningful
training experience and the business with
valuable training data including visibility
of workplace risks that may have been
difficult to identify previously.

With recent advances in web
technology, the creation of online Health
and Safety training can now be put in the
hands of the customer. Rapid Course
Authoring Tools provide a platform to
create E-Learning courses from scratch
with little or no technical knowledge.

These can then be rolled out to staff using
a Learning Management System (LMS).

As with anything that you create, it is
much easier to start with a basic course
and amend it to suit your own needs
rather than with a blank sheet of paper.

Some providers offer a library of courses
that can be edited using a Rapid Course
Authoring Tool, to suit the needs and
policies of your own business.

Of course, all of these new technologies
take time to filter down into real life
business applications. Does this mean that
we will all be doing our training on
mobile phones by the end of the year? It is
very unlikely. However, E-Learning via
the internet has now reached a stage of
maturity where it is viewed not only as a
viable alternative to traditional training,
but as a more efficient, flexible, effective
and less costly solution. With Software as
a Service (SaaS) now becoming common
place in businesses across the globe,
online Health and Safety E-Learning has
come of age.

Julian Roberts is managing director at
EssentialSkillz