As it’s National Stress Awareness day maybe we should all take 5 to think about our own stress levels. And if you wield a position of power at work (you wish!) then how are you managing stress in your workplace?

Take a look at ISMA’s top ten stress busting tips   Here’s a summary:

1. Learn to manage your time more effectively

2. Adopt a healthy lifestyle

3. Know your limitations and do not take on too much

4. Find out what causes you stress

5. … Continue Reading

Are you thinking about how to justify the spend on a new e-learning or training project?

Towards Maturity have some ideas on that:

1. Quantify the potential impact – don’t just concentrate on the technology and features

2. Align your learning strategy with the business

3. Leverage the experience of others

4. Position yourself for success – timing is everything

Take a look at the article from Towards Maturity here:

http://towardsmaturity.org/article/2014/03/06/building-case-spend-save/

What do you think? Will you find this useful to convert all those fantastic online courses you’ve been building?

Ok, so you don’t really want to waste time but sometimes it’s easier to turn something on it’s head and look at what NOT to do. Here’s our upside down time management tips along with a special offer on time management training if you want to learn how to be more productive.

Write lists.
Lots of them. Once you’ve done that, build a spreadsheet for your list and make it look pretty. Work out how you’re going to prioritise and code it – leave no stone … Continue Reading

 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 … Continue Reading

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.

… Continue Reading

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 – … Continue Reading

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 … Continue Reading

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…. Continue Reading