About a year ago I took the plunge and purchased Articulate, an e-learning development package. Articulate enables you to develop your own e-learning modules without the need for expensive design and programming. Having said that, the finished output depends upon the creativity and understanding of instructional design. If you tackle this as a solo developer, rather than one of a team of experts, expect for it to take longer than you think.

Articulate is a great product and has a great support community, but for me there has always been one nagging issue - output is exported to flash, and flash does not run on ipads. Yes there are now plenty of android powered ipad-like products, but the growth in ipad sales and loyalty of their users makes this a sector you can’t ignore. ( yes yes I know, I have always been a mac person)

I have been wondering how Articulate would respond to this. And now, a year after I purchased Articulate 09, out have come 2 new Articulate products, both of which publish to Flash, HTML5 and iOS which runs on ipads. The first new product upgrades Articulate 09 to Articulate 12, which still uses PowerPoint as its base. However Articulate Storyline is a completely new product and promises to be a very exiting Rapid e-learning development platform. I cant wait to free up some time, download the trial versions and take them for a spin. And then comes the decision, which to buy?

Tags: computer based training, e-learning

I was invited to present a workshop at the March 2012 conference of the Australian Association for the Manual Handling of People, along with the Moving and Handling Association of New Zealand. The conference was titled Challenging the Boundaries and had a heavy emphasis on training and education in this field. I chose to run with the topic ‘Improving Training Outcomes’

While I was researching for my topic I came across a forum of training and Education practitioners discussing the topic ‘What are the most important reasons for training failures’ I decided to analyse the hundreds of responses to the discussion and came up with what seemed to be regarded by the practitioners as the top things we should do to Improve our training outcomes. Most of these top 6 dovetailed with my initial brainstorm for the content of my workshop and I was able to use them as a research based framework for my content.

I have started a discussion forum with those who attended the workshop to tease out the content and to put into practice the issue that was number 1 - Ongoing follow up and coaching after the training event. Let me know if you are interested in knowing more.

Tags: safety training , train the trainer