E-learning in Corporate Training in China
Posted on August 25, 2010 by Li Feng | Leave a Comment
Many people have observed a trend in the realm of corporate training in China. That is, e-learning is becoming widely adopted in Chinese corporations. A blog posted by Alex Raymond presents some insightful observations on how e-learning is being employed in this area in China. These observations confirm what we’ve found with online learning in China.
First and foremost, Chinese students strongly prefer videos of the instructor giving lectures of the content in their e-learning courses. To them, this simulates the classroom experience as they can watch and listen to the instructor, as if they were sitting in a classroom. Indeed, many e-learning courses in China have this component and a lot of users expect it as a given. They tend to shun away from courses that are text-based.
The second observation that Alex Raymond makes is the significance of testing in e-learning courses in China, especially tests that lead to certification in certain industries. This observation is very true according to what we have learned in China. Chinese students seem to value the certification at the end of the course at least as much as they value the learning process itself. They need some kind of proof to demonstrate that they have acquired the skill/competence. As Alex Raymond puts it, “Training courses and e-learning programs that deliver a certification or formal degree are in much higher demand than voluntary or non-degree based e-learning.”
Another informative point that Alex Raymond makes in his blog posting is that, with the increasing popularity of small chunks of learning content (“bite-sized learning”), which concurs with our observation, and decreasing involvement of the IT department, e-training is easier to implement and can be “on-demand,” which is much more convenient for users and companies. On a related note, Chinese companies not only want the learning content to be on-demand, but want the reporting system to be sophisticated enough for evaluations of the learning experience and other analyses.
In his blog, Alex Raymond also points out that Chinese e-learners enjoy interactivity in their courses, including interactive quizzes, simulations, widgets, etc. and interactions with the instructor, subject matter experts, and fellow students. According to our observation, however, most of the interactivity in online courses in China is learner-to-resource (i.e. quizzes, simulations, widgets, etc.) interaction. On the other hand, learner-to instructor or learner-to-learner interactions are very limited. We would like to see increasing interactivity in the latter in Chinese e-learning courses.
To read the full story of Alex Raymond’s blog posting, please click here.
What are your thoughts on e-learning in corporate training? We look forward to your thoughts or comments on this topic! Please share with us here!
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W(h)ither the LMS?
Posted on July 27, 2010 by Michael Feldstein | 6 Comments
The UMassOnline team welcomes Michael Feldstein, notable blogger and founder of e-Literate, a weblog about educational technology and related topics and Principal Product Manager, Academic Enterprise Solutions at Oracle Corporation, past assistant director of the SUNY Learning Network, and commentator on Online learning as a guest blogger and to the extended UMassOnline community for an event featuring Mr. Feldstein on August 5th. For those local to UMassOnline or planning to be in the area, please join us Thursday, August 5, at the Cermax Conference Center in Marlborough, MA. Click to learn more about this event and reserve your seat.
Back in 2005, when I had the privilege of working alongside Patrick Masson and Ken Udas at the SUNY Learning Network (SLN), one of the challenges that we faced was the need to move to a new LMS. The system that SLN was on, a home-grown LMS built on top of Lotus Notes, had served the university system well but was showing its age. Accordingly, a group of us were tasked with identifying the needs of the university community and finding a platform that best fit those needs.
This is harder than it sounds because of the size and diversity of SUNY. The State University of New York is made up of sixty-four campuses, ranging from large R1 universities to tiny rural community colleges with everything in between, including a couple of medical schools, an ophthalmology school, a fashion design school, and a technical school. The ways in which these schools needed to use their LMS were very different from each other—and that was just looking at the campus level. When we dug deeper, we found that there was an enormous range of needs and uses even between individual faculty members. For example, I remember a couple of faculty members at the Fashion Institute of Technology (a SUNY school) getting excited about an image annotation tool that had been developed at Columbia University. They thought it might be useful for teaching art history and asked me to take a look at it with them. At first, they were thrilled with what they saw. It had rich functionality and was easy to use. But the deeper they looked into the details, the less satisfied they became. The tool was designed for use by a histology professor, and it turns out that teaching with images in a histology class is very different than teaching with images in an art history class. The tool didn’t do what they needed it to do. The more my SLN colleagues and I looked around, the more we realized that this is a common problem. Colleges aren’t factories and students aren’t widgets. Education needs to be individualized and so do learning environments. Read more…
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Next Speaker in UMassOnline’s Speaker Series: Michael Feldstein of Oracle Corp.
Posted on July 22, 2010 by Patrick.Masson | Leave a Comment
As you may have noticed, UMassOnline in July started a new series of events to feature learning technology and trends experts at brief local lectures to which everyone with an interest is invited to attend at no cost. Our first speaker, Professor James Dalziel, Director, Macquarie ELearning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE) Macquarie University Sydney, NSW Australia presented in July on learning design, identity management, technical standards and open community, content and software in education. Now we’re happy to share that on Thursday, August 5, 2010, our next speaker in the series will be Michael Feldstein, Principal Product Manager for Academic Enterprise Solutions (formerly Academic Enterprise Initiative, or AEI), Oracle Corporation.
About Michael Feldstein
Prior to working at Oracle, Michael was an Assistant Director at the SUNY Learning Network, where he oversaw blended learning faculty development and was part of the leadership team for the LMS platform migration efforts of this 40-campus program. Prior to that, he was co-founder and CIO of MindWires, a company that provided e-learning and knowledge management products and services to Fortune 500 corporations, with a special emphasis on software simulations. He has also been the interim CLO at The Otter Group, a Senior Partner at Christensen/Roberts Solutions, and a Senior Instructional Designer at Raymond Karsan Associates. In previous lives, Michael has been a freelance writer, an English PhD student, a middle school and high school teacher, a tire wrangler at a Yokohama Tire warehouse, and a professional loafer at Schooley’s Mountain County Park. Read more…
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UMassOnline’s ‘One World Class’ Campaign Launched Today
Posted on July 21, 2010 by Jennifer Brady | Leave a Comment
If you’re a returning visitor to this blog community, notice anything different today? Today marks the official debut of UMassOnline’s new marketing campaign.
For me, the all-important message about our expanding national and global reach and reputation is embodied in our new ‘One World Class’ phrase. I think of it this way: today we all live and learn together in one highly interconnected and interdependent world; in that increasingly unified or one world, UMassOnline markets and supports a growing and exceptional portfolio of world class programs developed by the internationally-recognized campuses of the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell, and Worcester). Taken together, ‘One World Class’ captures the essence of how UMassOnline has evolved since 2001, where we find ourselves today in this new global century, and why more and more would-be online learners from 175 countries now inquire about the online courses and programs from UMass. Read more…
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