Back in 2015 we published an article on elearningindustry.com about Rustici Software’s Experience API, aka xAPI, aka Tin Can API. It was one of many such articles in the wake of xAPI’s launch in 2013, and gave an explanation of how this new learning data tool worked and the great variety of systems it could theoretically gather and aggregate learning data from.
The future of learning is in digital courses. More and more individuals, schools, businesses, and organizations are purchasing online courses on everything from management skills to personal fitness. If you’re an expert in your field, you can make money selling training courses online to interested students. All you need is a little bit of information on creating the right content, putting it in the proper format, and making sure that it’s compatible with today’s standards for web-based learning technology.
Courseindex.com provide a suite of services around Moodle. Here we explain what we do and how it is of value to people and organisations who are entering the eLearning space.
Forbes is angling for a bite of the Continuing Professional Education market with learn.forbes.com, its new eLearning platform launched June 6. Aspiring professionals, the bedrock of Forbes’ readership, can now choose from 60-plus self-paced online courses focused on leadership, entrepreneurship, business, IT, sales and cybersecurity.
Online university EdX was started in 2012 by Harvard and MIT. It’s a not-for-profit MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) platform providing free online courses to advance careers and improve lives. It is now a leading provider of stripped-down, no-fluff, laser-focused postgraduate qualifications from top universities designed with today’s job market in mind. And employers love it because it provides them with candidates with up-to-date, relevant, job-specific skills.
It’s understandable for a Westerner to assume that Chinese is terrifyingly difficult to learn. With its impenetrable written characters and unfamiliar sounds, at first sight it can seem like a complex machine that only highly skilled experts are capable of understanding and using.
But when you take a little time to scratch the surface and pick up its principles one step at a time, not only is it quite similar to English but also refreshingly logical and simple. For example, here is an introduction to Chinese characters from the British Council:
For those who don’t know it, Britain’s Open University is something of a national treasure. Its abiding image is of bearded professors with questionable fashion sense delivering maths and computer science lectures on grainy black-and-white TV sets in the early hours of the morning when airtime is cheap. Established in 1969, the OU delivers degree and postgraduate courses to mainly remote students, though it does have a campus in the city of Milton Keynes.
What do private detectives actually do? Well, they don’t spend all their time solving murders. The police tend to deal with that. In reality what private detectives do is work that the police won’t or can’t do, don’t have time and resources for, have failed at, or are not required to do. PIs are also often employed by people who for various reasons do not want the police to be involved. And they are not all men.
If you have ever taken an eLearning course, do you remember the essentials of it now? Did it get the knowledge into your head in an engaging way that helped you to retain it? If the answer is yes, you were lucky enough to have taken a course created by a good instructional designer. Instructional Design is the practice of creating learning experiences which make the acquisition of knowledge efficient, effective and appealing.
What is the real value of an MBA? The skills developed, or the prestige of the issuing institution? For those seeking to add an MBA to their resume, their answer to that question will make the difference between spending thousands of dollars and spending no dollars at all.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
In 1233 a papal bull decreed that anyone admitted to the mastership at the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. Ever since then it has been set in stone that the rite of passage into a master’s degree is a three or four-year undergraduate degree. Pretty much by definition, a master’s is a follow-on from a bachelor’s degree.
Sometimes the Earth bites. Some would say ‘sometimes the Earth bites back,’ with climate change and rising incidents of flooding in mind. But most natural disasters are not man-made. There’s very little we can do at the moment about earthquakes and volcanoes, for example. And hurricanes and typhoons were around long before we started filling the atmosphere with CO2. So studying natural disasters and preparing for them shouldn’t be undertaken with a sense of guilt about self-inflicted damage. It should be done with a simple sense of self-preservation.
Those involved in decision-making in business and law might have heard of the OODA loop. Standing for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, it is a methodology for treading carefully, avoiding unnecessary conflict, and winning in challenging situations by performing actions based on rational decisions. To make those decisions, one must first fully understand the situation by observation, and get to know one’s opponents’ intentions and likely actions by orientation. The four steps in the loop are:
