elearning trends 2017 HR

3 eLearning Trends for Human Resources in 2017

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Education has long been tied to classrooms full of students, listening to a single presenter elaborate on a subject, and while this approach has its advantages, it definitely has a lot of limitations as well. As technology evolves, more and more of us are getting access to possibilities to study our subjects online. This is referred to as eLearning – using specialized software and an Internet connection to learn remotely, and this has a number of benefits, both for the teacher and the students.

First of all, it lets you cut down on costs significantly. A new skill is best learned through practicing it, and many eLearning modules nowadays have built-in simulation systems that can help students teach themselves through trial and error. Simulating these same conditions in real life (in a laboratory, for example) is almost always more costly, and requires a great deal of additional preparation.

Additionally, utilizing eLearning can definitely make the entire learning process more efficient and productive, since you and your students are not bound to a particular time and place. Students can learn on their own time and at their own pace, and only contact the teacher when they deem it necessary.

As a human resources expert, it is your job to make sure your employees are equipped with the right skill set in order to be able to perform their job adequately and efficiently, and utilizing eLearning might be just the way to do so. Today, we want to talk about some of the most utilized eLearning trends today, and how they can benefit your specific situation.

1. Learning Analytics

One of the most important aspects of an eLearning system is getting feedback, arranging that feedback into data that will tell you how well it is working for your students. In short, this is called learning analytics – the process of gathering data from your students, whether it is direct feedback, an analysis of the results of their work, or just about anything else.

If you don’t have this kind of information, you essentially have no idea how well your students are doing, and whether you need to adjust and improve the learning program to make it more efficient.

Various eLearning software now comes with a built-in learning analytics solution, so you don’t have to gather and organize the data yourself. The most you have to do is put together a survey or two for your students to complete, but all the statistical calculations are fortunately handled by the software itself. It’s a huge step up from having to do all of this manually, as it can be quite a time-consuming process, especially if one is not familiar with it.

2. Using an LMS for Education

LMS stands for learning management system, and by definition, it is an application for the administration, tracking, documentation, and reporting of various training programs and educational courses.

If you want to get into eLearning as fast as possible and use it to educate your workers, finding a good LMS is the first thing you should do. Our personal LMS, Classroom2020 is a great solution if you’re just getting into the world of eLearning since it allows you to quickly and easily pass on your knowledge to your students.

Classroom2020 can be used to create entire lessons in but a fraction of the time that it would take you to create one manually. When the time comes, the LMS can help you create a test to see how quickly your workers are progressing with the course using its powerful test generator algorithm.

And finally, the LMS helps you get feedback for your work by gathering all sorts of statistical data and organizing it so it is simple to read and understand, so you’re completely aware of which aspects of the course need to be rectified and improved.

3. Utilizing Examination Software

As we already mentioned, your LMS of choice will likely have a built-in test-making algorithm that will probably work just fine, but if you for any reason require some more sophisticated features, you might want to opt out for a dedicated testing application.

This will sometimes work much better and allow you to create tests of higher quality, and for that purpose, we highly recommend that you check out GetCertified. Whether you want your test to be automatically generated or create a test manually from scratch, GetCertified can do all that and more.

If you opt out for the manual method, there are still tons of templates that you can choose from to make your job easier. After the testing is finished, GetCertified can provide you with certificates that you can give out to the students who successfully complete the course.

These are just some of the features that any good testing software is bound to possess, and once you learn to utilize it, we guarantee that you’ll be able to generate hundreds of high-quality tests to properly evaluate the progress of your students.

Conclusion on eLearning Trends in 2017

While the classic classroom approach is still somewhat dominant in the world of education, eLearning is definitely the future with more and more people switching to it. As the tech improves further and becomes more user-friendly, eLearning is sure to gain more popularity, so it’s a good idea to get acquainted with the concept as soon as possible. It’s really a great way to improve the entire learning process, and no matter who you are, we guarantee that you as an educator can yield some sort of benefit from using it.

Employee Training Mistakes

These are the Mistakes you MUST Avoid in Employee Training

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The success of your company is directly dependent on how competent your employees are at doing their job. Employees with previous experience in the exact field that they are going to be working in at your company will generally have no problem with keeping up with their workload, but you won’t always get lucky with this type of employee. More often than not, you’re going to get a worker that, while qualified, has no previous experience with the type of work he or she is going to be performing, and so they’ll probably need someone to show them the ropes, as they say.

Because of this, it’s often necessary to have some kind of training program for new employees, a program that will be able to properly educate them and give them all the necessary abilities for the work they are going to be doing in the company. Now, creating a solid training program and properly putting it into practice is no easy feat, so educators often tend to make mistakes. Fortunately, these mistakes can be anticipated – you are far from the first person to have made them – and rectified before they cause any problems for the employees taking the training. In this post, we want to talk about some of the most common mistakes that educators make when putting a training program into practice, so without further ado, here they are.

Too Much Information

One of the most common mistakes that educators make when first initiating the training program is that they overwhelm the trainees with a bunch of info. And no matter how well you categorize it, you’ve got to realize that the human brain is really not that good at remembering different types of information during a short period of time. It’s a bit like when you listen to someone explain the rules to a board game you’ve never played before – you kind of absorb some of the info, the gist of it if you will, but you won’t really get it all down until you actually sit down and play the game. And you’ll certainly need to be reminded of the details more than once.

So, rather than bombard your students with all kinds of information and hoping that they’ll soak in the most important stuff, it’s better to just give them only the most important stuff at first, and then build up from there.

Failing to Motivate

Any time that we try to learn something new, our minds will immediately go to the question: “How can I use this information? Is this really something that I will need in my work?”

And as an educator, you really need to be aware of this fact and adapt your material so that your students always know why they’re learning whatever they’re learning. Lots of different examples are always good because they make the material of the employee training program tangible for the trainees and enable them to see the value of what they are trying to learn.

Lack of Communication

It’s important to realize that we as people are all different in terms of how quickly and efficiently we can learn a new skill. Some will pick it up pretty quickly, others might need more time, and what might seem like child’s play to one person can prove significantly more challenging to another, and vice versa. Because of this, it’s important to always keep in contact with your students and be aware of how well they’re mastering the material, and clear up any uncertainties that they might have over any subject.

Also, encourage your students to ask as many questions as they find necessary. Asking questions about one’s uncertainties not only clears up the uncertainty, but it is also a much more active and involved learning process than simply listening to a lecture. By involving oneself in a conversation with the lecturer, one’s attention span is significantly more powerful, and so it’s far more likely that the student will remember whatever it is that the question was about in the long-term.

Large Groups

The larger the group of trainees is, the harder it is to keep a sustainable level of communication between the students and the teacher. It is, therefore, good practice to keep this number to about a dozen or even fewer than that. The fewer people there are, the more effective the training will be unless you use some kind of software aided training program that can keep up with any number of trainees.

Using our knowledge testing software GetCertified, for example, it is absolutely possible to teach a large group of people at the same time, but only because you’re aided by a powerful computer program. If you want to keep the lesson as organic as possible, however, the number of participants is definitely something that you should keep under control.

Generic Training

Humans like diversity – we always have, and the less diverse a subject or lecture is, the more effort we need to put in to keep our focus and attention. This is why generic lectures that are always initiated and conducted in the same way will undoubtedly fail at educating your employees properly. Make sure that your classroom atmosphere is as dynamic as the training will allow, and you’ll find that it is much easier to keep trainee’s attention, and ultimately allow them to produce better results at the end of the training.

Summary

That about covers all of the most important mistakes you should always look out for when conducting employee training. To sum up, you need to make sure not to overload your students with a lot of information, make sure that your lessons are meaningful and motivating to your students. It’s also important to limit the number of trainees taking the training at the same time and encourage the students to initiate communication with the teacher in the form of questions. And lastly, make sure that your lectures are interesting and diverse, as that is way more likely to keep a trainee’s attention and thus help them master the material a lot better. Good luck!

Online Examination Software

Online Examination Software: A Must-Have Tool in Human Resources

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The employees are the backbone of any company. They’re the ones doing the hard stuff, the paperwork, the product development and just about everything else. Management has an arguably equally important but entirely different role, however; they’re there to make sure the workforce is operating at optimum efficiency, and that all of the tasks that should be getting completed are on their way.

In order to pull this off efficiently, a human resources department, as the name suggests, has to be aware of the resources that the company has at its disposal at all times. This means knowing what your workers’ abilities are, what they are capable of and what you can expect from them. The only real way to be aware of this is to run regular tests on your employees – efficiency and performance tests that can determine how capable they actually are at doing what they do.

Unfortunately, constructing good, efficient tests for employee training and evaluation is pretty hard work, more so when you have to come up with several tests over the course of a month. At least, it was very difficult before software technology advanced sufficiently to start developing automated testing software.

Benefits

The conventional approach to constructing tests had everything done by humans, and this is simply no longer necessary when it’s possible to be aided by software. Having a computer do the most tedious part of the job can be extremely beneficial when it comes to constructing tests, and here’s why.

First of all, humans tend to make mistakes when doing extremely repetitive tasks. This is why there’s always a percentage of defective products that have to be discarded from human-coordinated assembly lines because someone along the way made a mistake that was brought on by a lack of focus. A machine doesn’t exhibit this; all you have to do is tell it how to perform a certain task, and it will do it identically each time until it is told otherwise.

Second, by using online examination software to evaluate your employees, you gain the ability to include a lot more information – how long it took the employee to finish a certain section of the test, how many tries it took, and much more. These are variables that would be very hard to gather and analyze by hand, but computers are much faster and their focus is flawless and absolute. The quality of your tests can, therefore, be superior if you use online examination instead of conventional tests.

Online Exams in HR: How Much is it Used?

The question is, if online examination already has so many pros and not that many cons over conventional testing methods, then why isn’t it used more? Why aren’t more companies transitioning to online examination and making the testing and training process easier and more efficient? The answer is simple – people, especially successful people tend to be suspicious of anything they do not fully understand.

And truly, the online examination is a rather new technology, so it will definitely take a while before it’s as widely accepted as it deserves to be. On the bright side, there’s definitely a way you can use this fact to your advantage. By becoming one of the first companies to implement online examination in your HR department, you’re going to receive a considerable edge over your competition.

As we already mentioned, the process of evaluating your employees and know what your workforce is capable of is extremely important and provides you with valuable information that you then use to keep the company operating at optimum efficiency. By using online examination, this process will be done far more efficiently, and ultimately it is going to help you develop a more capable workforce than that of your competitors.

GetCertified Online Examination Software: Cost and Time Effective Solution

Another advantage of online examination software is that you usually need just one program to take care of all your testing and training needs. Testing software is actually developed with this in mind so that all your information and anything you might need is located in the same place.

Our software GetCertified is a great way to instantly get access to all the features you require from an online examination app, without having to jump through several apps to get the results you need. The app allows you to quickly and efficiently generate entire tests based on information from question pools and predefined criteria, saving you a ton of time and money in the process.

Additionally, GetCertified is very good at offering you detailed reports about the results of your tests, so you can better evaluate your employee’s performance. Using these results, you can compare the results of different users and different user groups, which in turn provides you with more valuable information about your employees. These reports can quickly and easily be exported into a PDF format, so you can print them out and share them with your peers for further discussion.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you now have a better understanding why online examination software is slowly becoming a must for any serious HR department. It can make your job a whole lot easier and improve your company in a myriad of different ways, so if you don’t already have some kind of online examination program going, it might be time to implement one. It’s a far smaller investment than many people think and will save you a lot of resources over the long-term, so if nothing else, it’s definitely worth trying out.

Knowledge Testing Software in HR

5 Benefits of Using Knowledge Testing Software in HR

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The human resource department is perhaps one of the most vital parts of any company – they’re the guys tasked with managing any and all of the information that has to do with the employees themselves. Redistributing the workforce, recruiting new workers, evaluating the performance of existing ones, developing public relations – these are just some of the tasks that the HR department has to deal with on a daily basis. These are not easy tasks by any means, and the more a company grows, the more the human resources department will have its hands full with various responsibilities.

One of the most important obligations tasked to an HR manager is, as we already mentioned, recruiting new employees and testing the various skills and abilities that they’ll be needing once they get to work and start contributing to the company. And to effectively gauge an employee’s skill, it is absolutely paramount that a good test is constructed. Otherwise, you basically have no idea if your employees are capable of performing their tasks at a satisfactory level.

Learning how to create a good test is a skill that takes time to develop, and it’s not something that anyone can do. If a person working in HR is going to be responsible for testing new employees and educating them, however, then that is one of the skills that they themselves should definitely possess. This is where knowledge testing software comes in. Nowadays, technology has advanced enough to allow the process of test creation, as well as the process of testing itself to be partly automated, which can make things a whole lot easier for the person constructing the test.

1. Knowledge Testing Software is Cost Effective

Creating tests is a tedious process that can sometimes take up a lot of resources, and using automated testing software for this purpose can help you greatly cut down on the resources needed. This is because automating any process makes it more efficient by default. Having a computer do most of your work for you means that existing employees can focus on tasks that are more important and require human intervention, while the software takes care of the most tedious parts of the test creation process.

Normally, performing test creation by hand and putting those tests into practice can cost HR a lot of extra money over the years, but with a good testing app like our Get Certified all you have to do is conduct a single payment of $6,900 and you’re all set.

2. It Saves Time

Automating a process of any kind, no matter what it is, means that it is getting conducted much faster than any human could ever dream of achieving. Modern computer processors can perform billions of operations in a single second, and this kind of processing power can really help you save time and energy when creating tests and having people take them. No more printing copies, sorting through the answers, performing statistical analyses of the results – the computer can do all of that for you, providing that it has all the necessary built-in features to do so.

The biggest advantage is quite possibly the fact that, when you use automated testing software, all the information you require is in one place, where you can easily look it up and access it whenever you need it. If the user interface is friendly and intuitive it’s very easy to do this in very little time.

3. Superior Skill Appraisal

When dealing with an automated knowledge testing software, the testing process itself can afford to be far more sophisticated, and return better and more precise results about how capable your employees are.  Gauging their abilities in this way will help you get a better idea of what “resources” you have at your disposal, and once you have that sort of information it makes it much easier to make decisions based on those resources. Both new and existing employees should be tested on a regular basis, and implementing automatic testing software to do this instead of you can make the situation a whole lot easier – both for you, and your employees.

4. Better Team Placement

Knowledge testing software can not only gauge how capable an employee is, but it can also give you a pretty good idea about in which environment their skills will be of most use. This means that you’ll be able to more quickly and much more efficiently conduct any team placement, and successfully redistribute your employees so their abilities will be able to get taken advantage of as much as possible. Good team building is absolutely essential to a functional workforce, and by utilizing automated knowledge testing software you can make even this process far more efficient and less tedious.

5. Data Protection

One of the most common concerns that a lot of people have when using software-based solutions to emulate and take over conventional tasks is security – specifically speaking, whether all the information fed to the software will end up in the wrong hands in the event of a hacker attack. The good news is that, even though this information is shared online to make it easily accessible to anyone who needs to access it, it’s also pretty easy to protect the information from people who don’t need to access it.

With GetCertified, for example, our experienced team of developers is constantly patching and upgrading the security system built into the software, in order to minimize the risk of a potential security breach that can prove catastrophic to a company.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many reasons why you should consider using knowledge testing software in an HR department, as it can make your work more efficient, quicker and create less hassle for all. If you haven’t already opted out for a knowledge testing solution, we highly advise that you do so as it is really a night and day difference when you have some help from automated, dedicated software to do the most tedious parts of your job for you.

 

Knowledge Testing

Top 5 Features in Knowledge Testing Software

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Knowledge testing software is a tool that can greatly help educators in the creation of high-quality tests, that are super effective at gauging just how well their students have managed to master the subject. Realistically speaking, constantly being able to come up with good tests is one of the hardest parts of being an educator, for several reasons. First, you have to make sure that your tests aren’t repetitive, or sooner or later your students will learn to take advantage of that. But let’s assume that all of your students have perfect morals and refuse to partake in any sort of cheating, and you still have to make a test that is clear enough to comprehend and yet challenging enough to accurately show how much the student has learned.

Therefore, an educator should be ready to accept any kind of assistance when it comes to constructing tests; not only will this make their lives easier, it will also make sure that the students get to take high-quality tests that will be a great help in their education. That being said, there are a few features that every knowledge testing application should possess. If it doesn’t, it can create additional issues that the educator then has to resolve, and today we want to talk about what we think are the five most essential features in this respect.

User Friendliness

Software-based assistance is only good as long as it makes us perform tasks faster and more efficiently than before. If it takes a long time for the educator to pick up on how to use the software, or the software is just not that user-friendly to begin with then most people won’t even bother with it. The same goes for the students; if the software isn’t “simple” enough for the average student to comprehend and master during the time they have to perform the test itself, then that can impact their overall grade and throw them way off.

In other words, the art of performing the test itself shouldn’t impact on how well the student does on the test – it should not be something that gets in their way at all. For these two reasons, it’s extremely important that the developer thinks about user friendliness at every point, as it is the primary means of connection with the user. It’s the first thing that they will notice, and more often than not it’s going to be the deciding factor on whether they’re going to keep using it or not.

Reporting and Statistics

Another very important feature that every knowledge testing application should possess is a way to collect and arrange test results, accept feedback from users and report the data back to the educator and/or the developer. Let’s talk about test result statistics first. When using an all-inclusive software training method with a good algorithm for arranging and processing statistical data, it gives the educator access to valuable insight about how well their students are doing, and in which area they may be lacking in knowledge and skill.

Handling statistical data manually can be a real pain, and although software capable of processing such data has existed for more than two decades, you still had to enter some of the information manually. A good automated testing application does this for you entirely and just provides you with the results and the facts you need to know, organized in a way that is easy to read and understand.

Knowledge Testing Security

When it comes to any type of app that potentially transmits personal information online, great care has to be taken for that personal information not to fall into the wrong hands. And considering how rapidly information and software technology is advancing nowadays, this is a task that is sometimes very hard to put into practice.

For identification purposes, it’s often unavoidable for one to input their personal information when registering with your knowledge testing software of choice. The personal information that software then has to protect is primarily that of the students, but of the educator as well, and anyone else who happens to use the software. This means that the software itself needs to be capable of creating a highly encrypted connection for transmitting all this sensitive information, especially if it’s required of the user to input their credit card credentials.

Multimedia Support

For years tests have mostly been based on text and simple images only, but that’s more due to convenience than anything else. With the help of a computer tests can now be expanded and upgraded to be much more interactive and intuitive than before, and for such a modern test to function properly the knowledge evaluation software has to have adequate multimedia support.

Complex images, video and even audio can now easily be included in a simple test, and by incorporating flash you can really create an interactive environment for the student that can help them understand the subject on a greater level.

User Management

Finally, one of the features that a knowledge evaluation application absolutely has to have is good user management. Put simply, user management is the process of handling a large number of user accounts – that can easily be present when using an online app of any kind meant for large numbers of people – and that includes knowledge testing software. Especially if the software is part of a larger all-encompassing suite like an LMS, you need to make sure that you have a decent control over the user accounts, and what sort of privileges get offered to them.

But user management also means that the users themselves can manipulate their accounts to a certain extent (being able to recover a password if they’ve forgotten it is a good example), so that they themselves can set the software up according to their needs.

lms

Teacher-Student Communication in an LMS

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One of the most important aspects of any good lecture is the teacher’s ability to connect and communicate with the students in a non-threatening, relaxed manner. A teacher who does this correctly will seldom have a lesson during which none of the students dare to ask any questions, and they’ll be able to properly gauge just how well the information is getting across to everyone in the room.

Using a software-based LMS can make these things both easier and more difficult, depending on our experience with using them and how good the actual LMS is. In this article we’ll cover a few things that every LMS should be able to offer both the teacher and the students in order to maximize the efficiency of the learning process.

Expression & Demonstration

A good lesson is far more than blandly talking about a particular subject and hoping that the students will catch on. An experienced teacher will use all the tools at their disposal in order to prove a point or demonstrate a phenomenon. Mimicry, concrete examples, drawings, graphs are just some of those tools, and the more the teacher utilizes them the better they’ll be able to convey what they need to the other side.

But even if a teacher does possess all these skills, it’s useless if an LMS doesn’t possess the tools necessary to facilitate and transmit all the necessary information to the students. If the students are located in a different room, you’re going to need a way to demonstrate and express everything you need to via a video and audio protocol.

If you’re demonstrating a software tool, for example, it’s highly useful to be able to capture your screen directly via the LMS and livestream it to your students. These are just some of the features that a good LMS should have in order to optimize communication between the two sides, and if these features are missing it can quickly turn into a problem.

Feedback from the Students

What your students think about you and your program is incredibly important, as the purpose of the class is to make sure they master the subject as perfectly as possible. Anonymous questionnaires and surveys are some of the best ways to get an honest opinion from your students, so an LMS should have an analogous feature that can perform the same kind of task in a virtual environment.

An LMS can even make things much easier in this regard, allowing students to leave anonymous comments at the end of the lecture or at any time they see fit. Teachers can be rated and ranked based on their performance with relative ease if the LMS is able to implement the necessary algorithm.

Without adequate feedback, it becomes increasingly difficult for the teacher to correct and adjust their teaching methods to fit the needs of the student, often resulting in a course that is either far too challenging, or not challenging enough. Students should definitely be given the ability to share their opinions about their teachers, both after and during the class, because in doing so they contribute to improving the program both for themselves and their peers.

Assistance

Mastering a lesson on one’s own is not always possible, and in such a circumstance a student can be in need of assistance either from a peer or even from the teacher. This is rather simple to do in a conventional classroom environment because there’s no spatial barrier between the two sides; everyone is in the same room and can communicate in a variety of ways.

When using an LMS, it’s great to have a feature that can make this kind of communication possible remotely. That way, a student can receive instant assistance with completing a task so they can move on to the next one as quickly as possible. The most common way of accomplishing this is implementing a remote assistance protocol, that can allow the teacher to directly interface the issue that the student is having.

An Interactive Environment

The best and fastest way to absorb knowledge and learn a new skill is trial and error; learning from your own mistakes. Therefore it’s very important to try and create an environment in which the teacher and the students try to tackle a certain problem together, with the teacher just guiding them along until they figure out the answer themselves.

This kind of interactive environment is sometimes difficult to create, especially when you’re not located in the same space, but there are certain learning management systems that have managed to implement such a function very successfully. A simulated environment inside an LMS can be just as effective at making students learn from their mistakes as a real one can, and the most obvious advantage that this poses is that students aren’t forced to share resources; they can access the simulated environment from their own device and run their own instance.

Monitoring in LMS

Finally, it’s absolutely essential that an LMS can provide the teacher with an adequate way to monitor their student’s progress through individual classes and throughout the entire length of the course. This can give the teacher additional insight as to which of their students they need to pay more attention to and who is most in need of their assistance. It can also be a great way to make sure your students are focused on the task at hand, so even though you aren’t located in the same room your students are still conscious of the fact that the teacher is present and that procrastination is not really an option.

Without proper monitoring, especially in the case of using an LMS you can quickly lose the feel that an actual class is being held, so having a monitoring feature implemented can definitely help “keep everyone on their toes”, for lack of a better term.

Conclusion

With that we’ve covered the most basic requirements for proper communication between the students and the teacher in an LMS-based environment.  Without any of these features, it can become increasingly difficult to properly keep in contact with your students and calibrate your lectures to their particular needs. So before you choose your LMS, carefully consider whether it has all the features you need (and all the features you think you might need in the future) built into the software itself, lest you regret your choice in the middle of a future lecture.

great content

Creating Great Content with Great Tools

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Education is an art as old as humankind itself, and just as humankind evolves so do our techniques in passing down knowledge and expertise. And thanks to the rather rapid advance of information technology, today we have access to a myriad of fantastic tools that can make this process easier, more intuitive and far more efficient.

However, the fact that many reputable and proficient educators have yet to catch up with all the opportunities that technology is offering them still remains, so these newest tools are often ignored, or it takes a significantly longer time for them to get accepted by the general public. An excellent example would be Microsoft PowerPoint – the most popular presentation software to-date that most educators use nowadays. And while it’s widely used, it effectively took more than ten years for it to become the standard, and for educators to yield and realize how much it can help their layout and presentation efforts.

Software technology is evolving at an amazing rate today, and some new kind of breakthrough happens just as it seems that it’s going to approach a crescendo, and we can’t foresee don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. The tools that this gives us access to are much more powerful than PowerPoint, and can help out both educators and their students in a number of different ways. But most importantly, they can make the process of creating educational content significantly easier and more efficient, which means that you can create better content and have more time to focus on other aspects of your work. We will try to cover in this blog post just some of the ways in which modern software tools can help you out in this aspect.

Automated Testing

Creating good tests is one of the hardest and most tedious processes that an educator can go through. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most important steps in your student’s education – a good test will properly gauge how well the student has mastered the craft, as well as how proficient the teacher was at passing down the knowledge and information necessary to complete the test with adequate results. Constantly coming up with tests that can do this right is really hard work, and it is not something that every educator has the willpower to go through.

However, the good news is that now there are software tools out there that can automatically generate tests based only on a handful of information „fed“ to them by the educator. This makes the whole process much easier, much less predictable and will never fail to provide you with an adequate test, providing you have the skills necessary to put one together yourself.

Simulation Courses

The single most efficient way of learning is through the trial error process, and creating an environment in which a student can learn from his or her own mistakes is exactly what you need to make them master the subject as quickly and efficiently as possible. Doing this used to be a real challenge prior to modern technology and would have taken a long time to set up. If, for example, you were teaching a subject related to working in a laboratory with chemicals, you’d have to have a wide array of tools and machinery at your disposal. Then you would have to prep your students with a multitude of complicated rules before they even enter the lab lest they should damage something, and walk them through every step of the way.

With software-based simulation tools, this is no longer the case. Creating a training course that your students can access from their laptops is much simpler, and much more efficient, than if they all had to interact with a single work environment (such as a lab) at the same time. However, the effect is the same – students are given the ability to learn through trial and error, in a simulated environment that they can use with ease and confidence.

Even though an interactive environment is often the best way for students to learn, there are other methods that often work just as good. A rather new way of teaching that can be applied to elaborating on virtually any computer-based skill is screen recording – namely, the educator uses a simple, intuitive piece of software to create a video snapshot of their screen, often with live commentary. This serves as an excellent tutorial is the process is thought out correctly, and is a great way to quickly showcase the practical side of any software-based task. It allows them to watch and imitate the tutorial in real time, pausing when needed and skipping over parts that they deem themselves already proficient in.

For this very reason, this is a huge step up from the conventional, live approach where an educator speaks, addressing an amphitheater full of students and sticking to a pace that students may or may not be able to follow properly. In such manner, every student can learn at their own pace and review the content as many times as needed.

Training Content Distribution

Once you create all your training content, there’s still the issue of distributing it to your students properly. The age of textbooks is just about over, and information can be readily and easily accessed online now, which is definitely something to take advantage of.

Keeping learning materials on the Cloud and sharing them with your students selectively comes to mind, and of course there are a lot of fantastic tools out there that do just that. This certainly is the way you to make sure that everyone can get access to whatever content they need, and more importantly you can organize it in any way you sense to be fit.

Summary

As you can see, utilizing modern technology can greatly aid in creating training and testing content, if you have an idea on how to use it. In this post, we’ve covered the four basic ways in which these software tools can help you create quality content with the least amount of effort, but of course it doesn’t stop there. As long as technology keeps advancing, new and improved tools will keep getting developed, and keeping up with them is a sure-fire way to make sure your educational efforts are on par with the best of them.

Laurentius de Voltolina - Illustration of education in 14th century

Did Technology Change Education?

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Albert Einstein once said:
“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.”

We all know the scene where the teacher lectures from a podium at the front of the room, while the students sit in rows and listen. Some of the students have books open in front of them and appear to be following along. A few look bored. Some are talking to neighbors. One appears to be sleeping. Laurentius de Voltolina made this illustration in the 14th century. Classrooms today sound pretty much the same in the 21st century? Let’s ask us why is that?

Laurentius de Voltolina - Illustration of classroom in 14th century

Source: uwplatt.edu – Laurentius de Voltolina – Illustration of classroom in 14th century

World today is very different from the world in the 14th century, thanks to technology.
Technology made some big transformation in industry, medicine, business etc. but you don’t hear education anywhere right? Why is that? Technology changes have a lot of impact on world’s economy, corporative management, and global trends. Also, it has great potential to reshape the nature of education and learning environment. So, again, why is education the same like in the 14th century? Is the school system wrong? Schools are saying how teachers are not ready to educate themselves when it comes to technology, how teachers in the elementary school have big hostility for new technologies.

Teachers let me explain you

You are confused. There are two different things. First one is “learning technology” (based on psychological and social-psychological research) which is helping to choose contents and goals to design teaching methods and environment for learning. All of this is needed, so that students can have better achievements. The other one is “delivery technology” which is necessary for providing an efficient and time-adjusted approach with those teaching methods and learning environment. They are both very important, but very different when it comes to their contribution to education. “Delivery technology” has an impact on costs and access to teaching and information. “Learning technology” allows having an impact on students achievements.

We have to understand the relation between technology and learning, because today that is an everyday thing. Everything that we see or hear comes from some kind of technology. It has an impact on nature and quality of learning. Teaching and learning, through technology, are changing the way students find out things, supply themselves with skills and strategies of thinking how to reorganize their time, assignments etc. All of that significantly improves their performances. Have you felt like this recently? Did school become a place which isn’t built for learning?

So, all of you teachers (who don’t want to improve your knowledge) should be fired, that’s right! No one wants to hear you lecture for 2 hours, give us a bunch of facts, and be like “here is the test”. We want someone who is going to be a good teacher, but a great psychologist. Someone who wants to try, to understand that technology is not going to change traditional education, whose activities through technology will improve education.

We are growing up in the environment, where tools of communication like email, online forums for discussion, allows us to express an opinion. Interactive video contents and chat provide us with direct experience of learning, while at the same time provide us to learn at our own pace.

While I was doing this research, I went to few schools to talk to them about this, and surprise, surprise.

Half of them, are not even furnished for next level when it comes to technology. In some countries, students are using books from previous generations. They have few computers, so they are splitting classes into 2 groups. Did this just become governments problem? If it is, then why Is this happening? Are they really more interested in investing in big shopping malls instead of the most important thing: our education? Here are just a few comments from few schools:

– “Equipment is just not enough. All that we have, we got because we insisted. We were rejected from Ministry for educations few times. We are a small school, but our kids are going to grow up same as everyone. Education should be fun, creative and should make progress.”

– “We have computers for our class in informatics, but they are really old, the school tried to fix them a few times, but we just don’t have any more money to fix them, even less to buy new ones.”

How is this even possible? The government should make the school be a place where they going to prepare us for the world that it is. If we are going to survive in the real world, where we use technology pretty much everywhere, we have to be prepared. New technologies are going to keep transforming the world in the ways we can’t even imagine. Just look how the internet works now? And we are still learning about dial up internet, in the time when it is not even used. Why are we seating in stupid rows like we work in a factory? Why we still listen to the facts for 45 minutes, without any real world application, standardized assessments, kids are carrying so many books that backpacks are bigger than them etc.

Learning is no longer limited to pencil and paper, so why do we still wait for the test, only to see that the year from previous 3 to 6 generations is still there, so what we didn’t make any progress, not even to make a new question for the test? Or why do we still have to wait for a week to find out our results?

Do you know that South Korea announced that they will transform their educational system into the most advanced model, in the way that you are going to be able to transfer the entire material to a digital version, available on any device by 2018? All classrooms are going to be digitalized.

Also, Germany is one of the few countries that have awake conscience that environment in which children are learning should be changing and modernizing.

In England, schools have software applications for online testing. Oxford has their own application for it.

Of course, I had to look at it. You can order a demo to try it. The market for this is huge. I found that 93% of employers use this kind of software for online testing (such as YouTestMe, E-sec, Sakai, etc.) to either hire or recruit employees. So that means that if we leave school with zero knowledge about this, we have only 7% of companies in which we can be hired?

Technology is changing, classrooms are changing, assessments that schools are using is changing.

Government, my question is why are we still standing in the same place, when everything else is changing?

What do you get from it? GENERATION OF ZOMBIES?

By: V.V.

Virtual Classroom Software

3 Features Virtual Classroom Software Should Have

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Virtual Classroom, as the term says, is a class conducted in a virtual environment, where geographically and temporally dispersed teachers and students conduct and attend lessons. In this classroom, professors can deliver lessons, elaborate on topics, ask and answer questions, conduct group assignments, take tests, exams, etc. Users can just browse the link and login to the virtual classroom, just as they would enter a traditional one. However, a virtual classroom is more than just an online meeting solution that enables teachers and students to interact regardless of the geographical and temporal barriers. It is an online, web-based software with numerous additional tools that make teachers’ and students’ lives easier and learning more economic and effective.

Institutions use Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) to facilitate, monitor, and assess student learning. The software allows for more efficient content preparation and delivery, tracking of student activities and achievements, and assessment process. Recent VLE software also collects information about students’ progress which can be analyzed to detect patterns and used to better support them in their learning. A VLE can be used to support traditional face-to-face instruction, as a part of blended learning practice, or a fully virtual education program.

With such a wide array of possibilities, VLEs have taken on an essential role in education in recent years. So let’s take a look at some of their various features which make them efficient for virtual classrooms

File Upload and Exchange

Uploading and sharing a variety of file formats is a fundamental feature of a virtual classroom. Uploading should be as quick as possible and should be possible both before and during lessons. Supporting a plethora of file formats (MS Word, MS Excel, PowerPoint Presentations, PDF files, flash presentations, flash videos, etc.) is crucial for a varied learning experience. This resource-sharing feature is extremely useful for sharing content in form of topic notes, subject diagrams or graphs, explanatory videos, etc. With this type of supportive and informative course material, learning becomes interesting and gives an interactive experience. A video is a powerful tool for enhancing student attention, as it engages more senses in the learning process. Seeing people one can relate to or recognizing familiar actions in a video triggers subconscious learning mechanisms that contribute to more efficient retention.

YouTestMe – Classroom2020 lessons may be enriched with different multimedia files – Google Docs, PDF files, video, sounds, and a URL. Add unlimited multimedia content to lessons and courses Create courses with multimedia content organized in lessons and lesson chapters.

Test Generator

Creating a good test is both science and an art form. It takes a lot of experience and practice to be able to perfectly measure the difficulty of each problem, to make it original, and to come up with different formulations for different versions of the test. The questions have to be appropriate for the students’ level. The type of questions has to be varied and well thought out. It takes a lot of time and effort, even for seasoned educators. Others simply lack the feel or patience for it and opt for an easy way out. The result is a test that is repetitive (think of administering the same test to multiple classes), too difficult, or too easy to complete.

VLEs now offer a special feature that addresses this problem, the test generator. It uses question pools to create, store, and organize questions by subject, objective, level of difficulty, grade, and type. Questions can be created directly in the VLE, imported from a test or one question pool to another. Test Generator randomly selects questions from one or more question pools, generating a test in minutes, providing teachers with the finished product. With adequate resources, test generators can potentially create unique tests, unique questions (content and type), and place them in a unique order for each student, which makes cheating all but impossible.

The possibilities of YouTestMe test generator are further enhanced by the Complex Problem Processor (CPP) – a unique, programmable feature for creating questions through coding. It is also able to connect to external sources and APIs and use their data to generate unique problem types; and the answer generator which can additionally improve the testing experience by enabling users to control the number of correct and incorrect answers for single and multiple-choice questions.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

SSL is a standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a server and a client. SSL allows sensitive information such as personal information and login credentials to be transmitted securely. Normally, data sent between browsers and web servers is sent in plain text, leaving you vulnerable. If someone manages to intercept data being sent between a browser and a web server, they can harvest and use that information.

YouTestMe security policies go even further, knowing how vitally important it is to protect the content and integrity of tests. After all, a test which can be easily cracked and circumvented is practically useless.  In order to access a certain feature in the system, a user must possess the appropriate privilege. User roles represent the combination of these privileges which define what kind of actions a user can perform within the system. No one gets in unless the test administrator allows it.

VLEs are a powerful educational tool, but also very complex. They can be created to serve various needs, goals, and learning methods, so their features can be many and widely different. That is why we chose to focus on those we feel are the most important for a successful virtual classroom.

Source: LinkedIn

On-Budget Software That May Improve Your Teaching

On-Budget Software That May Improve Your Teaching

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The proliferation of new technology is rapidly changing the world. These changes permeate into all aspects of our society, and education is one of them. These innovations can help teachers produce higher-quality content and deliver it more efficiently to students. However, these new possibilities often come at a cost. The availability of certain software depends on the financial capabilities of institutions, but also those of teachers and students. The high cost of the software will always be a limiting factor, regardless of its effectiveness. For this very reason, we are going to look at some options which require little to no resources to implement.

YouTube

YouTube offers a wide variety of educational videos absolutely free of charge, and millions of people visit it every day for this particular reason. Whenever learners recognize a knowledge gap, YouTube is one of the first places they look for answers.

YouTube is an immense repository of immediately available educational content from professionals and experts of all kinds. Formats vary from full lectures to short instructional videos, which are especially suitable for microlearning. YouTube is supported on all devices, meaning that it is available to anyone who has internet access. This information is all the more important if we consider the fact that mobile learning and microlearning are some of the biggest eLearning trends for 2017.

By allowing access to a huge number of videos and providing a platform for sharing one’s own work, YouTube offers practically limitless possibilities to enrich almost any lesson. Given the fact that Cisco announced that by 2019, the video will account for 80 percent of global Internet traffic, and nearly a million minutes of video will be shared every second, YouTube’s popularity is only expected to increase.

Prezi

When Prezi first arrived, there was a lot of debate about whether it was better or worse than PowerPoint. The answer to which of the two is better largely depends on the preferred style of the presenter and that of the audience. However, we are looking for the most cost-effective solution and Prezi, being free, is doubtlessly more affordable.

So what makes Prezi a good eLearning tool, besides its price? It might be the fact that it is particularly useful for mind mapping. Mind maps can be used to visualize, organize, structure, and classify information and ideas, as well as a mnemonic technique. For all these reasons it is considered a valuable aid to studying. Cunningham conducted a user study in 2005 which showed that 80% of the students thought mind-mapping helped them understand concepts and ideas in science. A meta-study about concept mapping, a technique similar to mind mapping, concluded that concept mapping is more effective than “reading text passages, attending lectures, and participating in class discussions”. The same study also concluded that concept mapping is slightly more effective “than other constructive activities such as writing summaries and outlines”. Having in mind its comparison to a white-board, it makes sense that Prezi is especially suitable for this sort of thing.

Prezi allows for more personalization, the experience is more likely to be immersive and more engaging than traditional instruction. Learners are able to work more intuitively and creatively, which results in improved retention and recall of information. Also, the zooming feature is great for demonstrating complex concepts; for example, zooming into a cell to reveal its constituent parts. All things considered, Prezi could be a fun and useful tool for various activities, especially for group projects since it includes real-time collaborative presentation editing.

Social Networks

Social media channels can be powerful tools for learning. As long as students are working together, there will always be an aspect of social learning involved. As of 2016, we are, on average, spending 118 minutes on social media every day according to Statista. With all that time spent on social networks, we might as well learn something in the process.

Social networks are a perfect place to look for information. Facebook and LinkedIn users can create groups that make finding and interacting with other people who have the same interests a lot easier. Comment sections act as forums where one may get answers to all their questions. This feature allows for lively discussions and exchange of information and ideas. File sharing is also a great way to pick up course materials, notes, or any other kind of content.

Since it acquired the professional learning platform Lynda.com and developed LinkedIn Learning, LinkedIn has become the leader in this category. It provides its users with thousands of online courses in various fields, such as IT, management, and personal development.

Final Thoughts

The idea of making education accessible to everyone is one of the great ideas of eLearning. With technologies evolving every day it is easy to get carried away with the predictions and throw around wild claims. One can easily forget that the quality of instruction mostly depends on the teacher’s own abilities. Content and structure are what make a good lesson. That being said, teachers who have put some effort into designing their lessons have wonderful options to improve them even further, even if they are on a budget. In addition to that, YouTestMe provides an inexpensive platform that supports all aforementioned features and brings them together in a secure and highly-customizable whole.