Broker ASSESS relaunched at BIBA 2012

Broker ASSESS, the broking industry’s most widely-used, authoritative online training and competency resource, has undergone a comprehensive upgrade. The new solution was officially re-launched by BIBA chief executive Eric Galbraith at the British Insurance Brokers' Association (BIBA) 2012 Conference and Exhibition today (Wednesday 16 May).

The upgraded Broker ASSESS has been developed to deliver a more complete, engaging and cost-effective online learning and development experience to help brokers better meet the challenges and professionalism demands of their ever-evolving industry.

Broker ASSESS provides comprehensive support for compliance training and CPD needs. Hosted on Unicorn Training’s SkillsServe platform, it has a highly intuitive user interface, easy to use search and browse for content features, more powerful management and reporting functions, and excellent integration with wider CII and BIBA broker services.

The unrivalled range of industry specific content focuses on improving brokers’ understanding of how regulation impacts on their everyday business practices. The new content includes a series of role-specific, interactive case studies focused specifically on the broker market plus a range of other context-based resources.

In February this year Broker ASSESS was awarded 2012 Microsoft Learning Technology Solution of the Year at the Learning and Performance Institute (LPI) awards.

The LPI judges recognised Broker ASSESS as a really effective use of learning technologies, covering core skills, development and CPD. They stated, “The system clearly demonstrates that, whilst technology is important, content is critical.”

Eric Galbraith, BIBA Chief Executive, said: “The system has had a huge impact helping many brokers to demonstrate that they are meeting FSA training and competency regulations. The upgraded system is a testament to the hard work of the broker ASSESS team and the brokers on the working groups who have helped to developed the system even further.”

Steve Jenkins, director of financial markets for the CII, said, “We have totally refreshed the content to support regulatory learning and assessments. Broker ASSESS is now even simpler and more intuitive to use. One touch reports are available for managers, compliance and training managers and we will shortly be introducing online appraisals and file checking to support brokers."

For more information about Broker ASSESS and to get a free 14 day trial email victors@biba.org.uk
Broker ASSESS is being demonstrated on Stand E70 at the BIBA Conference.

What can eLearning designers learn from video games?

Video games can be irresistible. Many of us, from our teens to an age where we really should know better, have succumbed to the temptation to just try one more level, blast one more screen of zombies or pigs, find that last missing coin, only to look at the clock and find its 4 a.m.

I cannot claim to have seen many eLearning courses that command such devotion from their users.

Of course, most video games are nowadays developed with budgets that we in eLearning can only dream of, but the underlying principles of engagement, immersion and design excellence could hardly be more relevant, and are remarkably simple to apply.

So here are my tips for bringing gaming ideas and principles to your eLearning.

1.      “It is the ability to choose which makes us human”. Dump the linear in favour of hub design. Let the learner explore, discover, make choices and feel they have control.

2.      “Do it, fix it, try it”.  Encourage learners to dive into a scenario or case study before they have all the facts, then make the facts available in context. It’s amazing how those boring facts come to life when you need them to solve a problem.

3.      “Specialist subject – the bleedin’ obvious”. Don’t make the user wade through bullet lists of learning objectives, or those dreaded user instructions where you point out that the X in the top corner closes the window, the right-facing arrow means Next and the left facing arrow means Back. We already know! Otherwise we couldn’t have got to this screen in the first place! Get on with it!

4.      “Feedback is the breakfast of champions” (stupid quote of the day, surely it’s Weetabix). Games continually tell you how you are doing. Try to find engaging graphical ways of measuring progress. You can also have more than one progress indicator. There’s a great example of this at the end of this blog.

5.      “I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed”.  Don’t be afraid to let your learners fail. Think how long it took you to get 3 stars on every level of Angry Birds. Users don’t mind “losing” so long as they are encouraged, get positive feedback on their progress, and get challenged to try again.  Build in risk of failure – having to go back and start the case study again is a strong motivator to focus, especially if you “lose a life” in the process.

6.      “Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious”.  Many of the best and most successful video games include the elements of humour and surprise. Why not eLearning? It may not seem easy to bring a good laugh into a course on, say, financial regulation – but actually it is. Use your imagination, and remember you don’t need to be ROFL funny. Even the mildest play on words can come as welcome light relief to the poor benighted compliance student.

7.      “Thank you Mario, but our Princess is in another castle”. There is not a lot of scope for randomness in most e-learning projects, but you can create blind alleys, make sure they add to the learning and then encourage the learner to explore them. Remember this when designing branched case studies – all that creative effort and no-one ever goes down the “wrong” route because the right route is too obvious. Give them an incentive to explore.

8.      “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change”. Games often use adaptive systems, adjusting the content, level of difficulty or choices to the level of the user. How relevant is that to eLearning?!

9.      “The gift of sound and vision”. Use high quality graphics and sound. The YouTube generation has made us remarkably tolerant of low quality video, but this is not the case with audio or with the overall user experience. Poor quality audio can be worse than none at all. We are also now so used to high quality intuitive UX from our home and mobile technology that even with our limited budgets, the quality of the graphic design is increasingly important to attracting and retaining the learner’s attention.

10.  “None of us is as smart as all of us” (Japanese proverb). When it comes to peer motivation, we may not be able to compete with World of Warcraft, but we can integrate simple social media tools into our eLearning, add league tables in the LMS, show the learner the last five answers to an open question, and so on.

If it still sounds a bit difficult, I recommend you to explore the Parliamentary Education Service web site. Here is just one example, a worthy winner at the 2010 eLearning awards which incorporates almost every one of the items I’ve listed.

http://www.parliament.uk/education/online-resources/games/mp-for-a-week/

Finally, a game.  Can you match the quotes above to their authors?

a.       Anon (Jap.)

b.      Ken Blanchard

c.       David Bowie

d.      Madeleine L'Engle

e.      Basil Fawlty

f.        Stephen Hawking   

g.       Michael Jordan

h.      Shigeru Miyamoto

i.         Tom Peters

j.        Peter Ustinov

Right, now back to those pesky pigs.

Answers  1 d, 2 i, 3 e, 4 b, 5 g, 6 j, 7 h, 8 f, 9 c, 10 a

Financial crime in spotlight at WKFS events

Heavy fines and inadequacies of financial-crime governance approaches and processes to date is proving costly.

The culmination of this came with the FSA Handbook FCC update in December 2011, an attempt by the outgoing regulator to put into place more robust processes and industry practices designed to make financial crime detection and prevention a high priority, and far easier and effective.

But how do you ensure you can get one cohesive view of your financial crime governance programme?

Unicorn Training partners, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services, are hosting a couple of events - online and an executive briefing - in May to shed more light on financial crime governance to comply with the latest FSA guidelines.

Among the expert speakers include Matt Allen, Director- Financial Crime at Unicorn Training partners the BBA, who will discuss the Evolving Financial Crime Regulatory Landscape, with other items on the event agendas including what you need in an effective programme and how you can achieve a structured, comprehensive view of Financial Crime Governance.

Wolters Kluwer Financial Services officially endorses Unicorn Training financial crime eLearning.

For more information about the events click here

What game have we got in store for you??

We are chuffed to be the first ever games sponsor for the 2012 eLearning Awards!

As revealed in April's eLearning Age, this brand new idea, courtesy of our good selves, will see us develop a fun video game for everyone who attends the gala awards evening in November to take part in on the night.

After some truly weird and wonderful ideas, we are excited about the idea we have plumped for and can't wait to get everyone in a flap about it! We can't tell you what it is all about just yet but guaranteed you will take to it like a duck to water.

We are big believers that the eLearning community could learn masses from the gaming world and this sponsorship underlines that.

To find out more about some this year's awards and what ideas didn't get make the final shortlist see April's eLearning Age magazine here, especially pages 7 and 22 ;)

In 2011 Unicorn Training was named eLearning Development Company of the Year at the annual awards ceremony.

"All you need is people who want to learn and a shady tree."

Unicorn Training Instructional Designer, Andy Houghton, on how his experiences volunteering at home and abroad has helped shaped his views on how learning should be needs driven.

"During a speech at the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) Conference in the USA on March 1, Bill Gates talked about technologies that can help increase the impact of teaching and learning. He envisioned better teaching methods and new education technologies that will revolutionise the classroom and encourage lifelong learning.

Although he was generally talking about school classroom learning, many of the principles he discussed are relevant to business online learning and development.

Bill outlined how exciting he thinks it is to see the growing number of entrepreneurs developing online learning systems in areas like mobile learning applications and e-books and the ways teachers are using a blended learning approach in their classrooms.

He identified four key trends in online learning.
1) creating more engaging and interactive ways of learning than the traditional textbook
2) using the Internet to post and find great teacher lectures and effective course materials
3) using social networks to increase collaboration among teachers and students and extend class discussions beyond the classroom
4) personalising learning—using gameplay and other tools – that give students and teachers important real-time feedback

However he said finding the right resources and figuring out how to use them is more difficult today than it should be. The foundation will be developing an online service that will help educators more easily discover and learn how to use these new tools.

I used to work in Honduras. The Registrar at the school once said that all you need for learning to take place were some people who wanted to learn, someone to help them and a shady tree.

Although I've been working in eLearning for about 10 years now, I still think there is a lot of truth in what he said - people who want to learn and someone to help them - though, as Bill Gates highlights, the way we deliver training now clearly has more options.

One thing that influences me is that the access to training has become far easier and more democratic over the past decade or so.

Outside of the day job, I volunteer for a small charity based in Devon which helps deaf and hearing impaired people through a system called Cued Speech. We have a website of resources (www.learntocue.co.uk), which is free to anyone and is in no way a commercial venture. Simply the resource is there and the only cost is the webspace, which is very little.

We also promote the work of the charity on You Tube and our most recent video explains how Cued Speech can help deaf people, usually children, access English as a means of communication. You can see the video here

I still think we have a long way to go and very often it is not the technology that is holding us back, it is tradition and conventions. In my view, these need to be held up to the light and looked at carefully to make sure we’re not just accepting conventional ‘wisdom’, nor are we throwing any babies out with the bathwater.

Our next venture is to promote training through Skype and video conferencing. The temptation is to see this as a poor relation to face-to-face training, but video conferencing does, in many ways, have some advantages over the classroom. Access to a tutor can be more frequent and when it’s needed, more personalised and so on. In addition, in an economically and environmentally changing world, technology can deliver training which is not only better focused but is also easy on the environment.

Key to our work is that what we produce is needs driven.

With the current cutbacks small charities like the Cued Speech Association are really feeling the pinch, but with necessity being the mother of invention, it is also providing an opportunity to think and work in different ways.

From acorn to accolade - behind award-winning eLearning

Laura Hooper is Unicorn Training's Learning Awards Instructional Designer of the Year. She provides the lowdown on how an award-winning project comes together......

"It was quite a shock to be named Instructional Designer of the Year Award at the Learning and Performance Institute’s Learning Awards earlier this month. It was even more of a shock as I only ended up an Instructional Designer by accident on this particular project!

I am primarily a content developer, but as was the case with the Volkswagen Financial Services (VWFS) project that this award recognised, I’m often involved in initial ideas and implementation.

No one gets too precious about job titles at Unicorn Training, and if someone has an idea that is discussed and liked, normally one where everyone feels the user is going to enjoy the learning as much as possible, then that person will regularly see their idea implemented. That’s not to say I haven’t had a few ideas that have quickly been cast aside too!

The basic brief for this project was that VWFS wanted a new bespoke eLearning course to provide pre-launch training on their new Gap Insurance product for 6000+ staff in their network of over 700 dealerships and distributors nationwide.

But here was the challenge. Firstly the details of the new product were only finalised in early December 2010, with a planned launch date at the end of January 2011, meaning we had just six weeks to turn the whole project around during a period that included Christmas and New Year. Secondly, VWFS wanted a completely novel approach to the design, the level of which couldn’t be built in any of the popular rapid development tools.

The showroom/office idea came up pretty early on but the details were a bit sketchy. Because we knew time was precious, I got on with building a ‘wireframe’ of the possible functionality /usability and we started taking a more iterative approach.

This basically meant that we were able to break the project down into more manageable, less scary sized pieces that interlocked like a jigsaw as the project evolved. Graphics affected the Flash build, the build helped the scriptwriting and the writing influenced the build in return, and so on. It didn’t take too long for the final concrete solution to start taking shape.

I’ve worked in eLearning for 11 years now and from experience, I knew I had to make the course quickly adaptable – it’s always possible things might change at the last minute! Text is held externally in XML format, so it can be edited, updated, re-written or translated by an SME in a convenient form, and instantly uploaded back into the course template. Similarly graphic assets and key design variables are held externally making it very simple for example to change background graphics and characters involved in the scenarios.

This turned out to be an added benefit as we ended up building a highly-flexible Flash template that has been reused as a unique and effective rapid development tool for multiple courses and modules. It’s always exciting trying to bring learning to life, so the user is as engaged as possible. I think the Gap Insurance course looked really good and it was really pleasing how well it was received by users and the good feedback it gained.

I’ll always be proud of the fact my work was recognised in this way but I was purely the figurehead of a close-knit team that was put forward for the award.

eLearning Detox drive by eLN (#c4ee)

As an eLearning Network Board member, Unicorn Training's Mark Jones is throwing his weight behind the eLN's 'Campaign for Effective eLearning' to wipe out ineffective, inefficient, flabby eLearning. He explains......

"The eLN connects people and organisations, encourages collaboration and believes vehemently that elearning is about so much more than just the ‘next’ button. Our latest campaign for effective eLearning aims to help everyone create and commission better elearning content, systems and apps. We want great eLearning and we want it now!"

The new campaign was launched with a presentation by eLN chair Rob Hubbard at the recent Learning Technologies - an online version of this presentation, plus more information about how you can support the campaign, can be viewed here.

The eLN is the UK’s number one source for guidance on best practice and future trends in technology-based learning and development at work, with nearly 3,000 members.

Mark Jones is LinkedIn at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/markjonesunicorntraining