We are delighted to announce that two of our clients, Western Union and Aon Plc are finalists in the Training Top 125 Awards. According to Training magazine, a leading business publication for Learning and Development professionals, finalists for the annual Training Top 125, which ranks companies’ excellence in employer-sponsored training and development programs both Western Union and Aon Plc have […] The post Two Nelson Cohen clients, Western Union and Aon Plc are finalists in the Training Top 125 Awards appeared first on Nelson Cohen Consulting.

Jason Kinsella is CEO of Cloud People, an Australian online education company. Cloud People’s Virtual Labs platform has been developed to help education institutions deliver cloud-based practice labs to their students in a user-friendly, cost effective way. Here, Jason explains how Virtual Labs can transform the delivery of IT courses and improve student engagement. Can […]

  What a week! A few days ago we released Uzity 2.0, our biggest update to Uzity—a learning management system for educational institutions and businesses—since the launch of Uzity itself. And here we are today announcing Fedena 3.5. It’s has been almost seven months since our last release. That’s because we’ve been working hard getting all the details right, and to bring you some big changes.   Fedena 3.5 is our biggest release yet and is jam packed with new and enhanced features to help you get the most out of Fedena. As always, we’ve listened to your feedback and made many of the improvements you asked for.   Automating and Simplifying Employee Leave & Payroll By far the biggest change in this release is the completely revamped Human Resources module. We’ve taken the foundation of the module and built out more exciting capabilities:   Employees can apply for additional leave even after exhausting their leave credits. For each Leave type, HR Administrators can define the leave carry forward settings and LOP calculation formula for additional leaves. Managers get notified of additional leaves. They can then mark additional leaves as ‘Loss of Pay’ and the necessary deduction can be made when generating payroll. Use Payroll Groups to organize employees based on their payroll. In addition to monthly payslips, payroll can also be processed Daily, Weekly, Bi-weekly, or Semi-Monthly. Payroll Category amounts can contain not just plain numeric values but also be calculated based on formulas or conditional formulas. Ability to generate and manage payslips of all employees from a single view.   Printer Support Fedena now supports the use of Laser, Inkjet, Dot matrix, and Thermal printers, along with the ability to set the page size - A4, A5 Portrait, or A5 Landscape.   Fee payment through Fedena Mobile   Parents and Students can now conveniently check their fee details, pay fees, and download the fee receipts—all from their mobile phones.   More CCE compliant   To make life easier for institutions following the CCE grading system, we have made Fedena more CCE compliant, especially for classes IX and X. Support for 6th subject and Assessment of Speaking and Listening (ASL) subject. Simplified formulas and formative assessment (FA) calculation modes to suit your requirement. Ability to upscale student grades in scholastic areas. Ability to generate the student’s ‘Performance Profile’ report according to the CBSE norms. Other reports as required to be uploaded to the CBSE portal.   Timetable management made more efficient   The way timetables are created and managed has been updated to ease timetable management. We’ve added a new feature called ‘Timetable Summary’ that will give you the subject-allocation status of each batch assigned to a timetable as well as the work hour utilization of employees assigned to a timetable. We’ve also redesigned the ‘Employee Work Allotment’ feature to help you easily manage employee-subject associations.   Exam management made easy   With a small UI redesign, the process of creating and managing exams for batches is now much simpler.   Finance Reports—more usable, more functional   When generating Finance Reports, you’ll notice the beautiful new UI. But it’s much more than just a cosmetic change. You can drill down to student/employee-level and transaction-level details. The report data is now more user-friendly and well organized.   These are just some of the major changes we’ve made to Fedena.   We hope you enjoy this release, and as always, we’d love to hear from you. Write to us at info@fedena.com and let us know your thoughts, questions, and feedback.   The post Fedena 3.5 - Our biggest release yet appeared first on Fedena Blog.

I will be attending and speaking at the Training Magazine Conference in Orlando Florida February 15th - 17th. You can follow what’s happening on Twitter - @jessiner, #trgconf. I’ll periodically post interesting tidbits. It’s looking like it will be a great time with a lot of great information.

Nice visuals are great way of keeping user's interest in online courses and as not every e-learning developer has super awesome designing skills, all the free graphic and icons come in handy in that case. There is a lot of free stuff on the internet to use in your private or commercial projects (always double check the End-user licence agreement to avoid any problems). Have a closer look at the simple picture above - in terms of designing, these icons are quite easy to draw but you'd still have

  "A perpetual feedback process supports and enhances Inquiry Based Learning".   Feedback promotes inquiry; inquiry opens the doors for feedback. When we stifle inquiry processes, we stifle feedback. Likewise, when we stifle feedback, we stifle the inquiry process for our students. What if we changed our perception about what feedback is and how it […]

Learning is the new literacy. Personal computers are just one example. We buy new ones every few years. Operating systems change. Programs change, get replaced, or become obsolete. But we often continue with the same habits until something goes wrong. Few us do the equivalent of ‘looking under the hood’. We learn enough to get our work done, but often do not take time to understand the underlying systems and logic. By not being active learners we lose the agility to react quickly to changing situations. We have to take the time to keep learning. It’s an effort that too many of us avoid. When was the last time you learned a new computer program? How many books do you read? When did you try to master a new skill? These are things we need to make a priority. If not, we risk becoming obsolete before our time. Aiming for retirement is not a bad thing, but what happens when it is forced on us and we are not ready? "Statistics Canada estimates 158,400 people aged 55 to 64 were handed permanent layoffs in 2015. Is there any hope of a comfortable retirement for those folks?" - CBC News When our son was in junior high school he came home one afternoon and said, "There seem to be two types of people, Dad.". "What are they?" I asked. "Gamers, and non-gamers", he responded. As an active computer gamer, he was comfortable being given a problem with no evident solution. Most computer games do not come with instructions, as learning how to master the game is part of the game. He said that other students who were not gamers did not have any strategies on how to look at the problem they were given, as there was no set-step method provided by the teacher. How do gamers learn? They try things out and usually fail: lots of times. They learn from these mistakes and look for patterns. If they get stuck, they check out what others have shared, in online forums. They may ask a friend for help. Sometimes they will look for a ‘hack’, or a way around an impasse. Once they learn something, they might record it and share it, so others can learn. What they do not do is look for the rule book. There are similarities in learning how to participate on the Internet or the Web. Some people just want a formula or procedure so they can get on with their business. Facebook makes this very easy. Others want to have more control. Twitter provides a bit more. But there are others who really want to understand what they are doing. They might set up their own online community using open source software and their own servers. While we cannot all be computer geeks, we live in a computer-driven network age. We ignore automation, the Cloud, the Internet of Things, and surveillance technologies at our peril. Learning is the only literacy that will enable us to counter the negative effects of digital technologies. This literacy is also social. It is learning through communities of practice and knowledge networks, which we have to engage with to make collective sense. How many of those permanently laid-off workers over 55 have external professional networks that can help them find work or get support? Over the years I have met many people in their 40’s or 50’s who suddenly find themselves without work. Most of them do not have a professional network beyond their organization where they may have worked for a decade or more. Once outside the company, they are adrift. Being an active learner by connecting with others outside our everyday lives can expose us to a diversity of skills, knowledge, and perspectives. In a creative economy we are only as good as our networks. An effective network encourages us to keep learning. A good community of practice changes our practice. The more often we change, the better we get at it. For example, my PKM framework was developed from the necessity to develop skills to be competitive in the consulting market. PKM is one way to push ourselves to keep on learning. There are many other ways to keep up, but active learning in social networks is no longer a luxury.   Image: adapting to perpetual beta Further reading: principles of networked management

Throughout our years’ in the software purchasing arena we have been asked many different questions and not surprisingly also many of the same. The process of purchasing software is fairly standard across the board but we also appreciate that each organisation has specific areas of prioritisation. Using this experience we have answered a range of frequently asked questions to arm you during your search and selection of an automated solution.  

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