Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Benefits of Virtual Schooling

Many people are aware of virtual schooling as an educational alternative. However, they might wonder just what makes it worthy of consideration. As with other forms of education, cyber schooling offers unique benefits. Here are just a few of them to consider:

Individualized Education

Having educational options means families can make the best choices for their children. Each child has unique educational strengths, weakness, needs and preferences, and virtual schooling allows families and educators to address these differences. In many cases, virtual schools allow families and educators to evaluate a student and provide a customized education geared towards helping the student learn and develop. With education individualized to meet his or her needs, a student may be more willing to learn and more likely to excel.

Learning Pace

A student's learning pace can prove a concern in any type of learning environment. In traditional classrooms, it is often important for students to adopt a pace that suits the classroom, so that no one lags behind others and no one gets too far ahead. Adopting an average pace is often important, in such cases, to keeping the flow of learning consistent and preventing students from becoming bored and frustrated. In a cyber school, however, this is typically less of a concern or a non-issue altogether. Because virtual education programs can be adapted to meet student needs, they often allow students to work towards mastery at the pace that is comfortable for them.


Flexibility

Many students and their families appreciate the flexibility that cyber schooling can provide. Rather than requiring students to keep to traditional school schedules, many virtual schools allow students to create the learning schedules that best suit their lifestyles. Here, the point is not to learn at a particular hour but simply to learn. Scheduling flexibility can prove helpful for students who have other interests to pursue on a regular basis. For instance, it may help students who are heavily involved in art, music, dance, and athletic activities. It might also prove beneficial for students who volunteer, work, or participate in internships. Sometimes family dynamics or travel schedules also make flexible scheduling a plus.

Guidance and Support

Often, families consider virtual schooling because of the support and guidance they can expect versus traditional homeschooling. For example, with cyber schooling, parents can benefit from the guidance of instructors and the support of counselors and mentors. Many schools also offer technical support, academic advising and tutoring help for students on an as-needed basis.



Article Source: Nicole_Madison

Friday, June 8, 2012

E-Learning Solutions for Organizational Training

In today's highly-competitive business environment, no company wants to be left behind in the race to reach the top. Starting from a well-planned business model to a strong work flow process, an organization has to continuously maintain a high-level of commitment towards its business goals. One would agree that an organization's success largely depends on its workforce and a well-informed and technically sound workforce can be an asset to any organization. Therefore, one witnesses organizations willing to nurture its workforce through regular and advanced trainings, to enhance skills and expertise.

Organizations schedule regular employee trainings, on a weekly or on a monthly basis, depending on the requirement. Earlier, organizational trainings followed the classroom-based teaching method. Though successful, such trainings meant consumption of a large amount of printed material, thus increasing training costs. Another drawback of the classroom-based teaching was that the trainers had to evaluate trainees' assignments manually, which consumed a lot of time of the trainers. With the advent of e learning, the scenario is changing dramatically.


E-learning has several benefits, such as it being less expensive, flexible, self-paced, easily manageable, and consistent. There many companies in the market that provide e learning solutions to corporates. These companies also extend their support for implementing the learning management system (LMS) in the organization. Besides that they help organizations in, assessing the skill-gap analysis of their employees and selecting the apt training modules for their employees. With the help of these e-learning companies, organizations are able to manage all the training needs of their employees without having to increase their budget, meant for trainings. By implementing the learning management system, organizations are able to groom their employees in a better way.

Since every industry functions differently and their training needs vary, the LMS content can be customized, as per the needs of an industry. All that an organization needs to do, is to communicate the e-learning solution provider, with the requirements of the required training modules. These e learning solution providers, with help of their expert content developers, subject matter experts, and instructional designers, develop high-quality content.

Organizations that do not wish to take the burden of maintaining the LMS, have the option of outsourcing to an off-shoring company. By outsourcing, the organizations can reduce their associated training costs by 20-40 percent. However, it is recommended that organizations do a background check on the off-shoring company, prior to outsourcing any work to them. The past clientele, quality of the content, and turn-around-time could be a good indicator for considering any off-shoring company.



Article Source: Gireesh_K._Sharma