Omniplex, a leading provider of e-learning solutions, has reported seeing impressive and rising levels of demand for its training courses in how to use the Articulate suite of e-learning rapid authoring tools. Omniplex’s managing director, Matthew Lloyd, explained: “Most of the people we see on these courses are HR or training specialists who are developing their knowledge of the software and its capabilities. They tend to be drawn from a wide cross-section of mainly large to medium sized organisations.”

The nine delegates on the course fitted his description.

Steve Russell, of the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) Group, explained that NEC Group is expanding the learning materials available to its 800 or so full time staff as well as the large number of people on ‘zero hours’ and casual contracts. He added: “Buying e-learning materials off-the-shelf can be expensive – so we’ve been attracted to the opportunities presented by Articluate to enable us to develop our own e-learning materials.”

Russell readily agreed that he was no ‘techy’ but said that the Omniplex Articulate course was extremely helpful and was giving him new skills which he could put to good use when he got back to his desk.

Kevin Clark, a training specialist with Getty Images, said that e-learning is offering a highly cost-effective and scalable way to make learning materials available to the company’s staff worldwide. He has responsibility for creating online, accessible and engaging e-learning materials – as opposed to ‘Word documents which have been put on a web page’.

“The Omniplex training course has kept up a useful ‘level’ of information and delivered it at a decent pace,” he commented. “One particular benefit is being able to have your laptop open during the course in order to be able to practise straight away the new techniques we’re learning.”

Lillian Livingston, a training coordinator with the pharmaceutical company Takeda Global Research, also praised the course – for filling gaps in her knowledge about Articulate. The University of East London supplied four of the delegates on the course – principally because it wants to develop its in-house authoring capability. The University’s Mat Tinker commented: “Articulate appears to be more all encompassing than other rapid authoring tools and, at a basic level, it’s highly intuitive and easy to use.”

Comment: Judging from those who attend these two-day courses, organisations are making increasing use of e-learning because it is scalable, available to a widely geographically dispersed workforce on demand and, by using a rapid authoring tool, it can be produced in-house with the minimum of fuss by training and/or subject matter experts.