SMT LEARNING

eLearning is a cost-effective alternative to traditional training, because it allows students and instructors to access courseware from remote locations, and eliminates the travel and accommodation expenses that generally accompany traditional training. Once you’ve paid to develop a set of courses, they can be used over and over again, or easily updated, as needed.

When you purchase an “off-the-shelf” elearning course, you’re purchasing a finished course. This means, that you won’t have an opportunity to customize the content of the course, or modify it to suit the specific needs of your organization. It could be a perfect fit for your needs. But on the other hand, there could be some holes that aren’t being addressed. When you develop custom courseware, you have the opportunity to develop your own course content, which means that the course will be tailor-made to address the needs of your organization.

Yes, we can. Knowledge Capture is the first step in our development process. During this stage of development, our Instructional Designers will work with your designated subject matter experts to identify the knowledge that needs to be transferred to your learner. We use the analogy of a job interview to guide/structure the knowledge capture process. We ask your subject matter experts to think of all the questions they would ask someone during a job interview, if they were trying to determine whether or not the person was fully qualified for the job. Using this analogy, we’re able to work with your subject matter to identify the knowledge and training that your employees need to have, to do their jobs.

The only time we want to hear the words “page turner” is if it’s in reference to the latest Dan Brown novel. The “page turner” approach to elearning is boring. Learners click through page after page of content, and they start to lose interest. It’s important that learners remain engaged with the content that is being presented to them. That’s why we do our best to ensure that our courses are interactive. Primarily, we achieve interactivity by making use of on-screen navigation and “discovery through exploration” learning strategies, where we ask the learner to unearth information by exploring a diagram, or an image. We also incorporate a number of “in-course assessments” or knowledge checks that encourage learners to think about the information that’s already been presented to them, and respond to questions.

SMT Learning can develop a wide range of visuals, including still photography, computer generated images, 2D and 3D animations, and interactive media. Typically, we try to ensure that there is an even distribution of media in our courseware, i.e. an equal number of photos, video, and computer generated stills. However, we realize that in certain circumstances this is not possible. And, at the end of the day, what’s the point of investing in custom courseware development services if you can’t customize the services to suit your needs. When we’re putting together a quote for a potential client, we’ll ask them about the types of media that they’d like to see in the completed course. We’ll also ask them whether or not they have existing images, videos, etc. that they’d like us to integrate into the course. If they tell us that they’d like us to create a course using all 3D animations, we’re more than happy to do it, but the price that we give them will reflect the extra work involved in creating the additional 3D images.

All of our courses are narrated by a professional narrator, so learners have the option of listening to the narration. If they choose to listen to the narration all the way through, then the narration will dictate the amount of time that it takes the learner to work through the course – i.e. the learner will work through the course in the same amount of time that it takes the narrator to read through the material. Most people can read faster than a narrator can speak. Accordingly, we do give learners the ability to mute the narration. With the narration muted, learners can work through the course material at their own pace – whether that’s faster or slower than the speed at which the narrator reads.

Yes, we can take content from your existing powerpoint presentations and convert it into an online course.