Want to Get a Quote? Contact Us

Posts from December 2013

LEARNING TO ASK THE QUESTIONS!

December 23, 2013 This will be my final blog of 2013 and, therefore, it seems fitting to reflect one more time on the educational differences between testing and the SOLs held in the one hand while the other hand holds out the promises of questioning and learning. The “Great Books of the Western World” and its companion collection, “The Great Ideas Today,” were published more than a half-century ago. Their introduction was...

GET ON BOARD: ‘INCLUSIONARY LEARNING’

December 18, 2013 What are the true “reading literacy” facts today? Only 24 percent of this nation’s 4th graders are able to form opinions from what they read, and only 34 percent of our high school seniors can. The majority of our working adult population cannot comprehend beyond a fourth- or fifth-grade reading level. Opportunity knocks! And that knocking your imagination should hear is for the full-motion, optional word-for-word audio, fully branched,...

TRANSITION IN LEARNING

December 16, 2013 A while ago I received two newsletters advocating the same thing: On-The-Job (OTJ) Training. One newsletter pointed out, “. . . you can learn about forklift safety, but eventually learners will need to drive one before true learning takes place.” The other observed, “. . . when you ask a dozen workers in almost any organization about how they learned their job — most will point to On The...

OUR WORKFORCE IS FALLING BEHIND

December 11, 2013 An article by Greg Toppo in the October 6 USA TODAY underscores a problem we have seen developing for the past decade: “A first-ever international comparison of the labor force in 23 industrialized nations shows that Americans ages 16 to 65 fall below international averages in basic problem-solving, reading and math skills, with gaps between the more- and less-educated in the USA larger than those of many other countries....

THE ROI PROMISE OF e-LEARNING

December 9, 2013 E-Learning has hastened the development of a new business model — and, its potential offers the reality of greater profitability for American business and industry! Instead of formal classroom instruction and prescriptive learning labs, with their predictable media courseware curriculum, e-Learning has allowed a demand-based approach that has effectively replaced the “everyone takes everything at the same time” regimen. And, by placing e-Learning behind the corporate firewall, the best...

TRAINING vs INFORMATION

“TRAINING vs INFORMATION“ December 4, 2013 Why have so many of us forgotten the real meaning of “Training?!?” Information-only programs are beginning to blur the lines. And, unfortunately, the real losers are those employees who need to acquire new skills — both for themselves and for their organizations. The distinction between “Education” and “Training” has been clear for centuries. While “Education” is difficult to pin down, the accepted definition revolves around the...

THE e-LEARNING THAT WORKS

December 2, 2013 If you are responsible for the training initiatives within your organization, you’ve got a plethora of choices. Videotape, DVD, CD-ROM and lecture/reading classes are the older choices you can make — and, while one can make a case for the first three, the fourth (lecture/reading) is so far removed from today’s learning culture that you do your organization a disservice by even offering that approach. However, if you are...