There is increasing interest in South Africa in using e-Learning to lower the costs of training and improve effectiveness. The issue is in getting started and how best to do this? We’ve written this post to be of assistance to those companies wanting to start training via e-Learning to outline the various options as clearly as possible.

This is not an attempt to pull any wool over the eyes to make our service look more appealing, I hate it when people do that. Rather this is a logical and honest overview of our market, its players and sensible arguments for and against different approaches to training with e-Learning. I’m sure that if you don’t believe me now, your own experience will shortly confirm what I’ve said here.

Let’s get started…

In our adventures in the South African e-Learning market we’ve come to know the landscape rather well. This landscape is divided into 3 main types of service provider:

1. Learning management systems suppliers
2. Content suppliers
3. Content developers

Our service doesn’t really fall into any of these but I’ll come back to us at the end.

Learning Management System Suppliers

LMS suppliers come in two flavours: Proprietary or open-source.

Proprietary suppliers are those that have built their own LMS while open-source systems providers specialise in tailoring freely available systems such as Moodle or Sakai for the company’s purposes.

Whichever supplier is chosen, due to connectivity and bandwidth concerns in this country, your company will most likely be required to install the system in-house. The alternative of hosting the system online leads to the obvious trade-off between high bandwidth cost or unexciting (and hence less effectual) text-based training material. This in a time where there is a strong move to reduce in-house IT infrastructural costs and an increase in software-as-a-service (SAS) models.

Regardless of whether the system comes free or not, there are costs to the installation and ongoing running of the system. The obvious costs to watch out for are:

1. Setup and configuration
2. Licensing or straight out software purchase
3. Maintenance and support
4. Hardware (the system is installed in-house remember so it’ll probably need a server or two to run on)
5. Client software (you may have to purchase software for the client machines)

The only difference between a free system and a proprietary one is in which category the majority of costs lie. In the case of the proprietary system, these are in the licence costs, in the open-source case, these are in the setup and configuration costs.

The advantages to buying and installing a learning system yourself are:

• Maximum flexibility with regard to training
• Some tailoring of the system for your purposes may be possible (more so with open-source than proprietary
• Increasing return on investment (generally as the use of the system increases, the costs don’t rise equally)
• The usual e-Learning benefits 

There are however, some drawbacks to think hard about:

• The major drawback from going this route is that you will probably need to source your own training material (probably from multiple suppliers). Also, you need to make sure any you find can be added to your system (this is not a given). Then you’ll need to actually have someone do all the courses so you know what they’re about and what quality they are before attempting to use them to train.
• The system needs to be run by someone who has a combination of skills including IT and training experience. This requires a change in the role of at least one employee (if not more) or the hiring of new staff, and obviously this person or group of people will also need to be trained on the system. Further to this you may need to reshape your employee benefits scheme to keep the administrators driving the process.
• If you want to build content specific to your organisation, you’ll need to find suppliers to help you. We don’t believe giving an employee a software tool to do this is sufficient since the ability to educate in the required technology is not a commonly held skill

If you find the costs are not exorbitant and you are considering the in-house approach, here are some questions to ask of your potential supplier.

• Do you supply any courses with your system that we can use? (some do, most do not)
• Is the system SCORM compliant? (this is the recognised standard for enabling content and systems to be interoperable)
• What support do you offer on the system and how much does this cost?
• To what extent can the system be customised?
• What training on your system is offered for the administrators and (importantly) the learners?
• What software is required on the learners’ machines?

For the most part, in our wanderings, we’ve only seen in-house managed solutions work in the largest companies. This is likely due to a combination of the time and effort required to make a success of e-Learning, courseware sourcing pains and the costs of implementing systems.

Content Suppliers

There are a great number of content suppliers in the world, though pitifully few offering South African content. The reason for this is that the market for e-Learning has been advancing for nearly 20 years in such countries as the US, UK and Australia. This means they’ve had a huge lead time on us to develop packaged course material while the market here is still in relative infancy.

If you consider that many training subjects are geographically neutral (meaning the principles behind running an effective meeting or learning the basics of project management do not really change depending where you live, for example), it’s easy to see that its worth neither the overseas suppliers time nor a local content developers time to SouthAfrican-ise this content. The Americans will rightly say our market isn’t big enough in their eyes to go to the effort, and local providers would just be reinventing a wheel that was perfected years ago.

(I argue that the only content that should be developed by locals is geographically-specific content like courses on the law, for example, or courses in local languages.)

Given that most content is available from overseas suppliers, the major obstacle standing in the way of a South African company wanting to get access to this content is that many of the suppliers will only share this with you across the internet. It’s a problem of copyright, you see? They would much rather control access to the content than have it distributed around the various local networks of South African companies.

This then means that you either have to access it via their online system or, if they agree to make it available locally, have a learning management system of your own. This is due to the fact that the content from overseas is most often in an e-Learning format and not on a disk as we’ll see next.

The alternative, which is much more prominent in SA (though content is still imported), is for content suppliers to be offering CDs or DVDs of courses. Now one may argue that this isn’t e-Learning in the real spirit of things, but it is an alternative.

CDs and DVDs may still offer cost savings over a face-to-face delivery, and are usually where companies start, but there are some obvious drawbacks:

• You need to manage the physical stock of disks. Most companies that have been using disks to train for a while have noticed a severe decline in the number of disks they think they should have on the shelves relative to that which they do have. The disks go missing, get stolen, left in disk drives, broken etc.
• If you have multiple branches, you will have to have more than one copy of the disk. This usually means increased cost
• Reporting on disk use and progress becomes near impossible since there is no central system capturing this information.
• If the course includes tests (which is often not the case) these results are extremely difficult to gather, and if possible at all require some manual process
• Tracking that the learner even did the training can also be tricky

Once you have a library of disks and you take the next step and get a learning management system to branch into e-Learning proper, it is not a simple process of adding this existing content to the system. Systems are run on bandwidth restricted networks; DVDs and CDs of training usually contain large, high quality files. These two things are not compatible.

Thus some sort of transformation of the learning content into a file size and type that is supported in terms of bandwidth AND the system is required (again SCORM compliance may come in here). Again, not a simple (or cheap) process so going the route of CDs and DVDs is really a short term solution if the company has any ambitions of using a learning management system to eventually manage the training.
 

Content Developers

Once you have a learning management system in place, the obvious extension to packaged course material is to start developing content specific to your organisation such as induction programs, system and process training etc.

Through our own trial and error we’ve discovered that content development is no simple task. I’m sure we had the attitude of most companies when we started that: “Given the right software and some content anyone should be able to make a reasonable e-Learning lesson”. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Content creation requires (to use a phrase content developers love to throw around) pedagogically sound thinking. In layman’s terms, you need to be a skilled educator to begin with. To further muddy this pond, you also need to have a good grasp of technology, since we’re using it to train people after all.

If you decide to take this process in-house you need these sorts of people about as well as the software to make it happen. This is potentially another costly exercise. Adobe’s popular market leading offering, Authorware, sells for around R40,000. Other products that create only certain types of training (eg. IT system’s training) can cost up to R8,000 for one licence.

Then you need to consider compliance with the popular e-Learning systems standards such as SCORM to ensure that any content you have developed will be able to run on any SCORM compliant system. Most high-end development tools will automatically generate SCORM compliant files.

So the bottom line is that the task of content development is often best to outsource and there are development companies out there to use.
 

Our service

As I said I would, I return to our service which is something of an anomaly as far as we’ve seen in the South African market. We looked at the competitive landscape and understood the various pros and cons to the different options I’ve outlined above.

We then sat down and developed our outsourced service to offer as many of the benefits as possible with as few of the costs. Our service isn’t for everybody. We’re not particularly interested in the largest corporates for instance since they will have the manpower, time and money to buy and implement a system and find their own courses.

Our service is for those companies that want e-Learning but don’t have these resources available to them.

• They don’t want to source courses or manage and own a learning management system. 
• They are having problems managing a large stock of physical training disks or perhaps want to skip that step all together
• They’re unsure if e-Learning will work for them and want to give it a try at no risk.
• They have a limited training budget and want to see how their costs may be reduced
• They want some flexibility when it comes to training and not to have to suffer large upfront costs for potential future returns to scale
• They need to develop training material but don’t know how or where to start
• Historically they’ve been unable to get the same benefits from e-Learning that the big companies have

These are the companies we talk to.

I’ve just finished reading a rather worrying article in the Financial Mail (Dec 7, 2007) (I’ve been away for a few weeks so please forgive the delay in my reading of this!).

The article is titled “Why SA Fails its Children” and it outlines the differences between a worldwide McKinsey report on what makes for successful education and the actions of South Africa’s education department in achieving this goal. I found this article so astounding that I thought it worth summarising the salient points here.

The McKinsey report analysed education practices throughout the globe to identify those factors that have greatest influence on producing educated individuals. In short, their top three factors (in order of importance) were:

1. Make sure the best people are hired to become teachers
2. Give them, and the principals of schools, good ongoing training
3. Make sure they pay extra attention to those at the bottom of the class

This all sounds like sound advice and these would have perhaps been among the factors you would have listed had you been asked to think about it a bit. However, the South African education department would appear to disagree.

Let’s look at their actions with regard to each of these ideals:

Hiring the best people

According to the article, increasing spending and reducing class sizes has little effect on success if teacher quality is poor. However, the education department has had little focus on improving teacher quality and instead favoured policies of curriculum reform, upgrading and building schools and re-engineering of processes.

Schools that did the best in the McKinsey analysis came from countries that tended to hire the top third of graduates as teachers. Teaching is a high-status occupation in these countries and highly sought after.

A second article (“Primary cause of Failure”) in the same edition of the magazine states that “Of a group of rural primary school teachers tested on Grade 6 material, half failed the literacy test (and) their maths average was 66%”. Shocking… and the poor salaries teachers earn won’t be helping to attract the top echelon of graduates either.

Added to this, many SA training colleges have been closed of late, bursaries have been cancelled and universities now manage teacher training. This while education departments in universities are under-funded and reports show that there is insufficient tertiary education capacity to meet the skills requirement of the country.

Ongoing Training

The first article goes on to state that the Education Minister (Naledi Pandor) tried recently to improve the training situation by creating a licence system by which teachers would be required to get continued training to keep their teaching licences. This she hoped would remove those in educational positions that were incapable of being trained (yes, they apparently exist). This idea was shot down by The SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) and is only tabled to be revisited in 6 years time.

The on-the-job training that already exist for teachers appears to be failing even though our teachers receive more training than do their opposite numbers in other countries.

Giving Extra Attention to Those Falling Behind

Special-needs classes no longer exist in South Africa thanks to the education department’s inspired policy reforms. And assessment criteria to at least monitor who is doing better or worse than others have been reduced. “Where students could once be refused promotion (to the next grade) for missing more than 60 days of school or failing their first language (!), these criteria have been removed”, we’re told.

So What’s the Deal?

Many have blamed poverty and inequality for the problems, though the successes of those attending schools in countries where the situation is worse act as a strong counter-argument.

The conclusion the articles reach is that it is the quality of educators that is at the route of the problem; but sorting this out is no easy thing in a country with such powerful unions. Says the second article, “Teacher trade unions have refused to allow testing of teachers, but where this has been done, the results are shocking.” (Refer back to the results stated previously).

Some more worrying stats are that “only 5% of grade 6s at township schools (can) read or write at the level expected for their grade. Only 2% (can) do the maths.” Reports also indicate that there is less time devoted to teaching, a slower pace to the lessons, and a lower expectation by teachers in township versus suburban schools.

Neither article paints a rosy picture of the duration of time we can expect before these problems are resolved. “More than 10 years” is one estimate.

Yikes!

E-Learning to the rescue?

Since we are an e-Learning company I though it only right that I jot down some ideas
Before I start though I need to say that I’m not in any way suggesting that we replace teachers with e-Learning delivery, I will be the first to agree that e-Learning cannot replace face-to-face interventions in the majority of cases. Simply that e-Learning in specific contexts and in delivering specific material (even if this is only a small part of a greater curriculum) may both complement the efforts of teachers and help alleviate some of the problems.

For one, the issue of poor quality may be improved through the use of e-learning since quality can be set when any lesson is created. In this way, the quality of education delivery is not dependent on the education levels of multiple teachers. A counter-argument to this is obviously that when using e-Learning a measure of flexibility is lost with regard to changing tack or slowing the pace, which human facilitators would handle naturally.

The counter-counter-argument could be that this necessitates that different e-Learning versions of the same subject be created, each version targeting an audience of slightly different aptitude. This could also necessitate flexibility be built in through the use of additional readings or optional educative tools that could be used by those lagging behind to catch up, or those leading the pack to stay entertained.

Still on the issue of quality, this time quality variance, e-Learning would help bring all in line with a given quality level (one of the benefits of e-Learning that attracts me is the ability to use computer-based testing to assess knowledge gaps and to assign learning that then fills these gaps, without having to assign whole subjects which a student may already have covered in part).

An obvious help would be cost saving in terms of creating and delivering content. With the kinds of numbers we’re talking here there would be major cost savings in using (and reusing) e-Learning content as opposed to the time and effort required to have someone physically presenting this information. Again, I refer readers to my earlier disclaimer.

So those are some points to start. In concluding, all that’s left to say is that I hope the government reads the same reports as the Financial Mail does and can have the soundness of mind to reassess their strategies on education in this country.

I’m not one to become a product or service “evangelist” (to borrow a phrase from modern-day marketers) but this is a special circumstance. We’ve been looking for a way to host our e-Learning content online. I’m not convinced the South African market is ready for streaming video from the web but there are instances when it may be the only option. So, we went looking for a web-hosting solution that would meet our needs.

We basically wanted a service that offered enough hosting space, a lot of bandwidth and one in which we could be confident that it wouldn’t fall over if the traffic picked up considerably (this was a real concern given that we are serving videos over the web, not just HTML and graphics).

We were advised by a local company in the hosting hardware game to contact a web hosting company (Let’s call them Company X) who are well known and respected. I met with representatives from Company X who told me my costs would be broken down into two areas: Hosting space and bandwidth and that there were only specific packages available. I would be charged for any extra space or bandwidth I didn’t use in the month. I mentioned to them during the meeting that I had been considering hosting internationally and I asked them for their opinion on this and the benefits they felt their service could offer over an international option.

They listed the following benefits:
- Local so I can call them or visit them to check on my server
- International bandwidth can become congested at peak times for the US
- There is normally a 300ms delay in requesting data from US hosted servers.

They quoted me for the bandwidth component of our requirement which came in at a cool R6,000 per month. I thought this sounded high but when you worked it out per Megabyte it was cheap by South African standards.

I had heard about Amazon’s business services and, looking for other options, went to check out their Simple Storage Services (S3). I used their online calculator and plugged in both the hosting and bandwidth requirements. The total monthly cost came out at…

wait for it…

$9

I checked it again just to be sure but the numbers were right. $9 versus R6,000… So what Company X was telling me was that 99% of their costs were for the pleasure of visiting them. And let’s not forget the 300ms delay time… I think I can live with that!

Better still, Amazon’s service is completely flexible – there are no “packages” which expire at the end of the month, you only pay for exactly what you use. So the $9 was the comparative cost for using the entire package that Company X offered us and more (since the $9 included the hosting space).

Now the Amazon service is not a “normal” hosting service that many of us are used to. It’s not accessible via FTP for one (FTP is a technology for transferring information to and from a webserver, so you can upload new data), and it’s targeted primarily at web-developers. This means there are a few more hoops to jump through than usual to take advantage of the service. (Those of you who are developers will be interested to check out Amazon’s other business services including their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is meant for massive outsourced data processing.)

The FTP access was an issue to me initially since I didn’t then have any way of actually using the service without doing some web-development to build a facility to do so (something I don’t know how to do). Then I found the S3 add-on for Firefox and that sealed the deal. It works just like an FTP program but built especially for the Amazon S3 service (and it’s free of course).

We’ve already added a load of files to our account in support of our e-Learning service and got our bill for last month – R3.50. There are other users of the service that have synchronised their hard-drives with their accounts on Amazon and use them as a backup facilities. All for the princely sum of about R7.00 a month (This of course excludes the exorbitant rate you pay for uploading the content through your South African based ISP).

I took these facts back to Company X, just to hear their opinion. To their credit they answered my email candidly to say that the Amazon service was the obvious choice. In their defence, they are victims of the same ridiculous telecommunications bureaucracy we all are. The only way they can hope to compete is if their market is in the dark about the options available to them. I knew that a South African service would be more expensive, but never to the degree that I found. I was certainly shocked.

In concluding, I would first recommend the Amazon service to anyone wanting to host anything online and, second, I can only hope that our government wakes up to the fact that web-hosting companies in South Africa are completely at risk of being run out of the market. The government strangles their ability to offer competitive rates while not defending their ability to compete at all. The only thing protecting them is an asymmetry of information between service providers and their market.

I’ve been in the US for 2 weeks now and while there have been a number of quirks of life here as compared with back home, not many have had the impact on me that the internet, or more importantly, the speed of internet connections, has had.

Like an animal born in captivity it is often difficult to comprehend the advantages held by the world outside the restrictive policies of ICASA and Telkom. In coming to the States I have had that world shown to me.

Back in South Africa I browse the internet from a 3G HSDPA connection. Not the fastest in the market, but certainly not the slowest. A 3G connection is advertised to afford the lucky customer a 1.8 Mbps download speed (upload is slower because of the type of connection, known as “asymmetric”). Of course, 1.8 Mbps is the absolute fastest your connection will ever be and since you share this connection with any number of other “lucky” customers in your immediate vicinity, there is a very small chance that you will ever see anything remotely near 1.8 Mbps.

I often check my connection speed using any one of a host of online free services for this purpose (check out www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ for an example). Most often I see speeds in the region of 150 to 350 Kbps (or about 0.14 to 0.34 Mbps), a far cry from my potential connection speed.

For this service I pay in the region of R400 per month.

I’ve just organised to have internet, cable and telephone installed here in the US at my girlfriend’s apartment. For the princely sum of $140 per month (or about R1000) we have:

• A 20 Mbps connection
• Over 250 Television channels
• Free telephone calls to ANYWHERE in the US at any time

I’ve just checked my download and upload speeds using the service above. I am seeing speeds of 8314 Kbps download and 2086 Kbps upload… These are actual speeds, not advertised speeds.

Of course, this makes the connection in South Africa completely laughable. If I were to download a 10Mb file using my 3G connection it would take me 6 minutes and 50 seconds. Here it takes me 1.23 seconds…

So what’s this all mean for us as e-Learning providers?

Well consider that the market for e-Learning is just taking off in SA while it is already highly advanced in places like the US, Europe and Australia.

In these countries it is possible to watch high quality video online without waiting eons for buffering and without having to pay for each megabyte downloaded. For companies and individuals in SA, online video streaming is, for the most part, out of reach for reasons of either connectivity or cost (or both!). For e-Learning this necessitates an in-house solution with video stored somewhere on a local server or courses handed out on DVDs.

Now think about things from the point of view of the e-Learning provider. They have issues of copyright and digital rights management (DRM) to consider. Placing the actual learning files on an in-house server or on DVDs is a huge risk. Providers would be much happier if they controlled all access to their content through a nice firewall such that direct copying of material is avoided (or at least made difficult). And so it is in the developed world – e-learning files are all stored on web servers out of direct reach but still viewable.

For these reasons, many overseas suppliers of e-Learning are understandably hesitant to share their files with us in darkest Africa (and believe me there is still that impression by many here in the US at least!). Subsequently, they have made little impact on our market and will continue to do so as long as our connection speeds are slow and their trust in us is questionable.

The future

Let’s jump ahead, say 3 or 4 years (the number is debatable!) to a time when Telkom has let us have a decent internet connection at a reasonable cost. Suddenly, online hosting of courseware becomes a possibility and in-house e-learning systems and courseware are shown for the cumbersome solutions they are. Of course, offline learning will remain a feature of our market for time to come as accessibility of remote regions remains a problem.

Now, with a great internet connection, the developed countries start to have a more attractive offering to the local South African market: Hundreds of courses built and improved upon during the 20 odd years since e-learning began in earnest, accessible online at any time from anywhere.

SA competition

Luckily for us providers in SA, there are some things these overseas providers will have a hard time competing on. One is local understanding of the market, who knows who, how to get an “in”. The other is localised courseware in respect of local examples and case studies and alignment with SAQA standards.

South Africa may be a gateway to the rest of Africa and because of this, we as e-Learning providers should not rest on our laurels, but at least in the early stages of international competition, South African providers hold all the aces by way of knowledge, ability and, more importantly, reason to align material with government specified outcomes. Any local provider not pursuing this line of reasoning will become the early casualties of the international e-learning competition that is just over the horizon.

I’ve recently completed a stint at UCT, lecturing a course in Digital Marketing to a group of second and third year students. While I found their responses in class to be enlightening, their written work left much to be desired. My experience, I think, points to a problem in the schooling system that provides students to universities that struggle to write argumentatively. 

The students’ backgrounds were mostly in accounting and economics and some had done marketing before. The course was a great experience for me in both preparing and delivering learning content – something I’ve never had to do from scratch. The course covered the use of the internet and cell phones as media for marketing: reaching the market through digital communication, selling online via e-commerce etc. 

This week I’ve been marking their final essays and, I must say, I’m rather shocked at the level of written work from them. The group were highly responsive and we had some good back and forth debates in class. It was obvious from these sessions that this was a bright group who could think around the topic. 

The problem seems to have come in putting these thoughts to paper. I asked them, as their final assignment, to first conduct a market analysis and then create and motivate for a digital marketing strategy for a South African company. The majority of students answered the two parts to the question as they might a survey or short answer question – in complete isolation. The analyses of the market had little to no bearing on the final recommendations – the students merely “filled in the blanks” when it came to using analytical tools such as SWOT and PESTLE without any concept as to why they were writing what they were writing. Many analysed aspects that were completely irrelevant. 

The analysis of problems in isolation was evidenced further by the fact that they submitted multiple small assignments in the lead-up to the final essay, each of which covered a topic that would have been relevant to the essay. Yet very few included any of this prior learning at all. 

On the point of writing skills in general, there were numerous issues. Very few students wrote a lead into each section of the report, sections just started with no indication to the reader as to why they were reading the section. Then there were some students who handed in reports completely in bullet form, not written in an essay format at all. I could go on… 

So what’s going on? I surmise that the schooling system is at least partly to blame. Make note, this isn’t a language issue I’m talking about here – the inability to communicate in the written medium isn’t limited to students who do not speak English as a first language – the problem is across the board. 

From their work it is evident that the students have little experience in writing to make a point. They are used to short answer questions, regurgitating facts and generally not having to think too hard about a problem. Ask them to build up an argument and they fall over.  

The practice of wrote learning at school limits the ability of the student to think outside the box. They are taught what they need to do to pass like a formula: “answer these questions like this”, “when you see this say that”. There’s a complete lack of understanding of causation. Without this understanding how can we hope students at university (or more importantly recent graduates now in the workplace) to be able to build up an argument? 

This could have ramifications for their ability to push for a budget, promote their ideas or bargain for a better salary. 

In reading these essays I’ve had the distinct feeling that the student are unable to disassociate, look at the problem from the outside and think from someone else’s perspective. Most of the content lacks any kind of substance, anything more than: “The target market is people between the ages of 14 and 40 and very attractive to the company”.  

In speaking to others in my position who have been lecturing for longer than I have, it seems the problem is getting worse, not better.  

So what to do? It’s been a long time since I was last in school, so I’ve limited my advice to universities. Here are some of my views:

• Start early

From the perspective of the universities I would recommend more effort be placed on training students in their first university years to write more creatively and argumentatively – have dedicated subjects for this. I don’t think it is sufficient to rely on existing courses such as economics or marketing to do this since they assess according to very different criteria. If necessary, move the subjects that perpetuate isolated thought into later years.

• Give loads of feedback.

I know from first-hand experience that there is a yawning gap when it comes to feedback to students. They are not presented their final papers wherein the majority of testing around this matter is done. Rather set bigger assignments during the terms and give feedback individually on issues.

• Make more of the support structures

Like any large organisation, universities are terrible at cross-departmental functioning. There are often numerous support entities of which students (and lecturers) are completely unaware.

• Create common assessment criteria

If all course lecturers marked first on independent and well reasoned thought and second on regurgitated facts, things would quickly change.

• Fail people

It’s so tough to get tough when it’s a student’s future on the line. But at the end of the day, if you don’t cut it you shouldn’t pass. This is a contentious issue given that many blame the education system and not the student for the shortcomings. If the right support is offered and students receive their feedback but don’t take it to heart, the system can no longer be blamed.  

If you have views on this subject I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment.

We’ve been hard at work over the last few months putting together our new outsourced e-learning service. We’re confident it will appeal to a broad range of markets such as SMEs, consultants, schools and more. Basically anyone wanting to train via e-Learning who either don’t have the specific IT skills to make this happen, or for whom owning and managing their own solution is too much work and money.

We’ve partnered with 2 great local companies called the Video Lounge and Future Learning through the great Debbie Terry (who’s involved with both). Through the Video Lounge we’re able to create South African video content and Future Learning’s existing catalogue is being incorporated into the new service.

What results is a really powerful combination of service providers that will stand us in great stead. Thanks Debbie! With some last adjustments being made to the learning management system and after a brief stint I’ll be spending in New York we hope to get going at the end of October. 

Keep you ears open!