Everything you need to succeed in the wild and wooly world of mobile learning and e–learning, and hybrid college, K–12 and career courses. By Susan Smith Nash

Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce has released the Briefings to the Incoming Minister from the Ministry of Education, the Tertiary Education Commission and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority.
These documents are available here in pdf format.

While adaptation and change are necessary for continued success, neither organizations nor individuals find them easy. Information, communication, and learning technologies offer assistance, although no single solution fits all organizations or all individuals. Author Clark Quinn explores e-learning, information portals, and e-communities in a quest for a coherent understanding of the options and a schema for effective deployment.

In the current evolving economic environment, it is important for organisations to effectively implement and utilise e-learning applications, strategies and techniques to up-skill their workforce so that they are more productive, higher performing and competitive in regional, national and global contexts.

Recommendation 11 from the 2025 Taskforce chaired by Don Brash deals specifically with education including market interest rates for student loans and rationalisation of the non-university sector, whatever that might mean.

Executives today know that business depends on well-skilled and knowledgeable employees who make the right decisions, work effectively and efficiently, and keep their skills up-to-date. Especially in today’s economy, executives want to make successful financial investments when deciding what methods to use to keep staff well trained. Therefore, they demand to know the data and case studies that support new learning approaches like eLearning. This document addresses five key questions that senior executives ask about eLearning benefits and challenges.

In this very succinct download, key lessons from Nestles experience upskilling its global workforce using elearning are described. The importance of learning as an integral part of organisation culture is identified, and the link between elearning and culture is also hinted at when this brief case study mentions internal branding for example.

This overview from the Australian Flexible Learning Framework is an excellent summary of key aspects of good online facilitation. It begins to explore the complexity of this function and demonstrates why this is a skilled and specialised role in effective elearning.

The recommended download this week is really a whole series of downloads. Peer Group and Collaborative Learning in real and virtual worlds was the theme for the eLearning at Edinburgh Conference held in August. The full conference programme with links to abstracts, presentations and videos is available.

The information is intended for elearning professionals and is heavy going if you are new to the field, but even a quick glance through the abstracts will give you a sense of the scope of collaborative elearning in practice.

The Benchmarking and Research business activity of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework has released An investigation of the enablers and barriers to industry uptake of e-learning: Small business which examines the current status of e-learning in small business, barriers to the increased use of e-learning solutions and the potential for increased uptake of e-learning by small businesses.