Interest and curiosity were strong features of the workshop that took place on 29 September at the Vodafone Village in Milan, in preparation for one of the posterLabs of the exploring eLearning events entitled “producing independent eLearning courses”. The many companies taking part included CGT, Club Med, Gut Edizioni, Pirelli, Prada, Salini Impregilo as well as all the Vodafone resources involved in digital training, connected online throughout Italy. Vincenzo di Martino, Training Manager at Vodafone opened the workshop, illustrating the group’s new projects in the digital sector. Di Martino emphasised the company’s core focus of implementing the development of digital skills at all levels, skills mapped in what Vodafone defines as “Skills Taxonomy” divided into Horizontal Skills – at all levels – and Vertical Skills, specific depending on the role. He then continued by outlining the goals of Vodafone’s digital strategy based on key words such as Observe, Experiment and Phygital. Following Di Martino, it was the turn of Franco Amicucci, the founder of Amicucci Formazione, who focussed attention on the production of independent eLearning. A whole host of questions need to be posed before embarking upon this activity and the answers can be very different. What professional expertise is necessary? How much time is needed? But also, how can participation be encouraged? Often there is a lack of awareness that the necessary skills may already exist within the company: the colleague at the next desk may be a good photographer or an excellent speaker. The next two presentations connected to this were given by two collaborators of Amicucci Formazione: the first Lorena Patacchini, whose focus was on the importance of macro-design and content editing. The trainer has a new role as an architect of learning, able to manage a wide variety of methods, including the latest generation eLearning. This is the definition of Instructional Design, which together with the developer, if this is a different person, constructs the training course making use of professional experts, graphic designers, speakers, video makers and developers to create it. After a short break the last speaker, Paolo Limoncelli, took to the floor, dealing with the necessary skills for developing eLearning. There are four essential ingredients that make an eLearning course a success:
- Method: to build and acquire confidence with a design system that is flexible, precise and well-organised.
- Languages: to codify and share a visual code that is light and high impact, in order to stimulate learning without confusion.
- Technologies: to move proficiently in the technological context that surrounds the content, recognising limits and potential, nurturing the capacity to filter in order to select the most appropriate solution.
- Continuity: to attribute importance and value to the Tutor figure, which could be of a technical as well as a didactical nature, within a Social Learning context.
A few easy-to-use applications with excellent results in terms of quality were then presented and certain indications were given for creating them. Limoncelli closed the session by presenting some interesting case histories and “Train the Trainer: the Ax Masterclass experience”, a course formed of six modules, each lasting two days, to be run in the spring at the headquarters of Amicucci Formazione, and which will be run again next winter. Find out about more preparatory workshops at www.exploring-elearning.com