The ClickClass Blog

Wouldn’t it be great if you could access cutting edge educational content from some of the world’s leading institutions in one place completely free of charge?  Well now you can in the form of iTunes U.

iTunes U brings together a whole range of educational resources (including lectures, videos, films) which you can access through the iTunes store.  You can download the resources and organise them as you would your music library making them easy to use and completely mobile.

Here’s a quick overview:

As a provider of e-learning authoring tools we work with a large number of freelance training consultants who use ClickClass to develop and provide their own e-learning programmes for their customers.  Whether you are a freelance training consultant working in the area of sales, management, customer service (or any subject area for that matter), adding e-learning to your portfolio can reap huge benefits including:

• Differentiating yourself in the marketplace. As anyone who has worked as a freelancer knows, the training marketplace place can be very competitive.  Anything which can enhance your portfolio and provide a richness to your offering is a benefit.  Providing e-learning courses to your customers can help you achieve both of these things.
• Generating additional revenue from traditional classroom based projects. In today’s difficult financial climate tools to help you generate additional revenue has got to be a good thing.  E-learning can not only enhance the learning experience for the participant but can also increase the revenue potential for you as the training consultant.
• Providing the ability for a faster roll out. One of the key issues which can face freelance training consultants is a lack of time.  By using e-learning as part of a blended programme, you can push the learning out to the participants faster without being restricted by for dates when you can schedule in face to face training.
• Enhancing the learner experience. Done well e-learning can enhance the learner experience by increasing retention, allowing learners to work at their own pace, acting as a source of continued reference, addressing different learning styles – the list is endless.

All of the above depends on an e-learning programme which is relevant, engaging and contains rich content.  A key part of this is to ensure that the subject matter expert is at the heart of the development process.  ClickClass has been specifically designed to make it easy for training consultants to author, deliver and manage their own e-learning content.  We handle the technology so you can handle the content.

When E-learning began to really hit the training market back in the1990s it was hailed as the successor to classroom based training.  However, these promises never quite materialised and early adopters were left with huge libraires of expensive online courses that they couldn’t get their learners to engage with.  Traditional training companies everywhere breathed a huge sigh of relief as organisations began to wind down their e-learning offerings.

Fastforward a couple of decades (give or take a few years) and E-learning has advanced enormously.  The days of wading through glorified PowerPoint slides are (or at least should be) long gone.  Instead today’s e-learning puts the learner at the heart of the process giving them the opportunity to tailor their own e-learning experience by being:

We’re growing, things are moving fast.  We need good freelance instructional designers, based in the UK, to complement our full time team.  If you are interested then please send your details including covering letter and CV to enquiries@clickclass.co.uk

As we continue on our social networking journey we come across lots of interesting things.  We thought that you might like to share this information and have now added two additional pages to our blog where we have started to build our interesting lists.  Keep checking back as we’ll be adding things all the time.  If fact, why not subscribe to our blog to ensure you don’t miss anything.  Simply click on the RSS feed on the right hand column.

We recently contributed to an interesting piece of work by Lindsay Abbott regarding the Growth of Audio in the E-Learning Industry.  Lindsay is a voiceover artist who has been working in the e-learning industry for a number of years now.  Her blog outlines the results of some research she has completed in this area:

http://www.lindsayabbottvoiceover.com/2011/02/audio-and-the-e-learning-industry/

There are lots of people out there blogging, tweeting and generally commenting about all aspects of e-learning.  To be honest it can get pretty confusing with lots of differing opinions and theories.

One great source of opinion and advice comes from the groups on Linkedin.  They are made up of people who have experiences (good and bad) of e-learning, work in that field or are simply interested in the subject.  They provide good, honest feedback and advice and when I wanted an opinion on who I should be listening to in the e-learning marketplace, Linkedin was my first stop for suggestions.  Here’s the list that they came up with (the comments on each one are from the person that suggested the blog):

Jane Hart at C4LPT – a great blog and source of information

Guy Kawasaki – not just elearning, but learning with technology, instigating change, big picture

Karl Kapp – great info on gaming, Second Life. Karl is a great practitioner. He doesn’t just write about it, he lives it.

http://lrnchat.wordpress.com/about/ a place for people interested in the topic of learning who use the social messaging service Twitter to learn from one another

Patti Shank author of the “Online Learning Idea Book” and a very talented and knowledgeable consultant in the field

http://blog.cathy-moore.com/ Cathy Moore author of the blog “Making Change”:  and many entertaining yet informative presentations on making meaningful yet engaging elearning

Marc Rosenburg comes to mind because he is moving forward in mLearning.

Colum McAndrew has a technical writing background.

Richard MacManus of www.ReadWriteWeb.com

Clark Quinn

Now, I can’t tell you whether or not these blogs are good, bad or indifferent.  That, as a reader, is for you to decide.  What I can say is that all of these people are out there, getting their opinions heard and are being read and rated by other likeminded folk.  Over to you!

PS:  I would, of course, like to add ClickClass to that list and hope that you will to!