Innovations in ICT education in the 1990s paved the way for modern-day eLearning so what should we expect in a modern ICT eLearning product?

The early development of computer-based training programmes for ICT software was the initial innovation leading to the birth of what we know today as ‘eLearning’, in a time when these were termed CBT or Computer Based Training. The pedagogy for software education is significantly different to that of other education domains and I was interested to explore what this long period of product development may have done for the efficacy of this genre of eLearning. I turned to one of our established specialist publishers in this domain, KNOWHOW2, to understand more.

KNOWHOW2 has been creating eLearning solutions for over 30 years and their design approach has always been to deliver highly interactive, software simulation-based training where people ‘learn-by-doing’ rather than the more passive use of video recordings.

Chris Samarajiwa, the CEO of KNOWHOW2, comments ‘a recent innovation we have introduced is the flexibility to automatically switch the interactivity mode to match the type of device in use (PC, Table or Smartphone) so that the learner can fully experience and exploit the features of each type of user interface in the simulated learning environment.’

Asking Chris how their most successful clients are utilising their eLearning courses to drive real people productivity improvements in their organisations, he comments ‘Our most successful customers all share two attributes. Firstly, they invest time and effort to actively engage each and every community of learners. Secondly, they introduce policies and reward structures designed to motivate people to upskill. Simply put, they make the training relevant to each person and reward them for completing training courses that improve their productivity at work.’ Sound advice that certainly resonates with our experiences across our client and partner communities which perhaps can be expressed as ‘it’s not what you do but the way that you do it’ that counts most. Conversely, Chris comments ‘in situations where clients’ achieve less impressive results, it typically has less to do with the performance of the courses themselves, and more to do with people failing to seeing a clear path to their advancement in the organisation’.

Finally, I asked Chris what we can look forward to over the next twelve months from KNOWHOW2.

‘Microsoft is the only major player left in the Office Productivity market. They have recently announced the next version of Microsoft Office (2022), due to be released in the second half of 2021 and we will be developing a set of courses to support the new application versions. Over the last year I am sure we will have all seen the rapid increase in demand for collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams their integrated use with the other Microsoft solutions and we will be working to develop courses in this space as well’.

If you would like to explore the KNOWHOW2 courses, you can view their full course catalogue here.

Also do remember, that we can deliver any of their courses through your internal LMS, or we can provide you with a dedicated and branded version of our Course-Source LMS, if preferred.

You can also search our comprehensive multi-publisher catalogue offering a huge range of microlearning and longer courses here.