There is a crisis in the human resources climate, as critical as the climate crisis. Talents and passionate people are being wasted, positions are filled with people that do not like them. It is time to change or simply allow change to happen.

Our current thinking and education system is failing.

Here is a video of Sir Ken Robinson that I recommend for your viewing.

I just found this great video that I felt really brought the point I made in an earlier post about how video, more specifically Online Videos, can revolutionize education.

This is a great presentation by Salman Khan, from Ted Talk 2011. In this video he talks about k-12 education but I believe what he is saying can be extrapolated to Adult Education.

Over the past few years, I’ve had many people ask me if Online Learning is better than in-classroom learning. Like you, I have read  lot of different opinions on this subject. In this post, I will discuss this, and contrary to what you may think, the answer to this is NOT always yes.

Whether an Online or a Virtual Learning Environment is better than Book Learning or in-classroom learning depends on a few factors.

First, it very much depends on YOUR learning style. I wrote about Learning Styles in a an earlier post so I won’t add too much about it right now. What I need to say is that discovering your learning style is critical to how you can maximize any learning environment you find yourself in. If you don’t know what your learning style is, or are not sure, do take a few minutes to find out. The time you invest now in finding more about yourself (self-awareness) will pay back in multiples in time saved when trying to learn something new.

Second, it also very much depends on HOW the material is presented. Yes, you can blame the facilitator, teacher or the presenter for this one , and the environment. It is not always the student’s fault. Read the rest of this entry »

Learning Styles are the way you learn best. It is your preference for:

• working in groups or alone
• learning by seeing, hearing or doing
• a particular way of reasoning.

We’ve all heard of the dismal state for reading literacy of the students coming out of our school system and I do not need to add to it in this post. What interest me here is how to I develop a product, a marketing plan or a course to target today’s audience that clearly does not like to read.

Here are some recent stats from the US Census, and I am sure the stats in Canada and the UK are not much more encouraging.

So, does it not make sense to explore different media to target your audience? Over the last year, I had the opportunity to develop a few online courses, and most of them delivered via online video lessons. The feedback and the actual test results from our students are outstanding. Adults like the options to be able to pause, rewind and play back videos at their leisure. They tell us that they also like to be able to even play the video on a larger screen, as it makes them feel more like sitting in a classroom.

On the marketing side, we’ve also started to use short videos on client’s web site with great results. It looks like Google also likes video a lot. Our tests showed that pages with a video posted on it, with a great title and a short paragraph to introduce the topic or product and service showed on the video, ranked people than the similar topic or subject page with a 800-100 words article.

Go figure, people really don’t like reading that much any more. So, don’t quit writing great content but do add a short video – it will pay off.

PS: I’ll start making video posts, or at least make the post available as audio soon.

Alain