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The latest in Course-Source’s series of presentations and networking meetings promoting elearning within the health service, this event focused on rapid design, development and delivery.

Held at the Royal Society of Medicine on 3rd April 2008, the aim of the day was to show health professionals how easily they could create their own e-learning courses; the range and quality to be found in ‘off-the-shelf’ content; and what options exist for hosting courses either on Course-Source’s hosted LMS, or for NHS professionals, Course-Source’s new HealthELearning.net platform.

First up was Laurence Wilson, Head of Instructional Design with Course-Source and content creator of the award winning TACTICS e-learning project on Intra-operative Cell Salvage. His presentation stressed the importance of good design in successful e-learning, and he passed on various hints and tips to help delegates create, assess, organise and develop content. Notably, Laurence praised the use of mind mapping in designing e-learning, providing a useful background to the process in readiness for the next speaker, Robert Furnival of Mindjet.

Mindjet is the creator of MindManager, a mind mapping software tool enabling millions of individuals and teams to work smarter, think creatively and save time every day. Having just launched Mindjet Connect the day before the event, a collaborative tool invaluable for enabling several different individuals or teams to work together to create the map for e-learning training programmes, Robert was keen to demonstrate the project. Having seen it, there was general agreement among presenters and audience that such a software tool could prove invaluable on e-learning design projects involving not just several individuals or teams, but also multi-sector collaborators or stakeholders.

For anyone present who might have been put off creating in-house e-earning courses on the grounds the task would be too time-consuming, Mike Alcock’s presentation on rapid development was a real eye-opener. The Managing Director of Atlantic Link, he used his software to create a basic e-learning course in just two minutes! By the time just twelve minutes had passed, Mike had added a video, a quiz and the content of a PowerPoint presentation. With a two-day course being all that is required to learn how to use Atlantic Link software, any “I don’t have time to create e-learning” excuses appeared to have been blown out of the water.

However, Richard Norrie of FAST healthcare made the unarguable point that there is no point reinventing the wheel; if generic, off-the-shelf e-learning will get the job done, why not use it rather than create your own content? Dedicated to creating short, work-based, interactive and user-friendly e-learning for health professionals, FAST healthcare offers a range of learning products covering clinical, non-clinical, Care of the Elderly and Safeguarding Children. Richard gave a demonstration of FAST’s latest course on the hot topic of Clostridium Difficile.

Finally, Course-Source’s Ken Wood summed up the day, thanking the aforementioned Course-Source partners for their helpful presentations, and demonstrating how Course-Source can provide the LMS necessary to back up any kind of e-learning initiative, whether off-the-shelf or bespoke content. He also highlighted the many features and benefits to the NHS of the new Course-Source HealthELearning.net portal, encourage everyone to sign up to the free site.

Comments received from participants on the day included:

“Excellent venue, facilities and speakers”

“A highly valuable experience to meet like minded individuals”

“An interesting array of information, enough to open ones’ mind and consider using something new”

“Good content, clearly demonstrated”

Podcast: http://www.course-source.net/style/media/Developing_ELearning.mp3