Guinness Trust use rapid elearning to Perform their own online courses
Guinness Trust, the national housing association founded by the great-great grandfather of the Guinness Brewery, is one of a number of companies seeing the benefits of developing their own online courses. They have used the Perform rapid elearning tool from Jenison to provide a greater range of training opportunities to support professional and personal development. Their first project was to develop a course to support the introduction of new Age Discrimination legislation.
Guinness Trust are just one of a number of companies who are now seeing the benefits of developing their own online training courses. A national housing association founded by the great-great grandfather of the Guinness Brewery originally to “improve the condition of the poorer classes of the working population of London”, as a charity it is important for them to keep costs of training down. The Training department started to look at other ways of delivering training apart from the traditional classroom style. Elearning was presented as a way to provide a greater range of training opportunities to support professional and personal development.
The Guinness Trust decided that developing their own elearning courses would be a good way to update staff on new legislation. With an eye on cost-effectiveness, Guinness Trust chose the new rapid authoring tool from Jenison, Perform, to develop their own courses. Their first project was the Age Discrimination legislation which became law on 1st October 2006. The course was developed in a matter of days and is now required learning for all managers and anyone who is likely to be involved in recruitment to complete. The Guinness Trust have found that staff are happy to undertake the elearning courses and are now focusing on internal marketing to achieve management buy-in around the country as well as developing further courses.
Reflecting on his experience of launching elearning at Guinness Trust, Steve Mullings, Learning and Development Manager, outlined the benefits he had found to the Trust. “At Guinness Trust we have found that implementing elearning has reduced our training costs and reduced the time out of the office for staff. The online courses enable staff to work at their own pace and the online mechanism enables us to quickly bring staff up to date on changes in legislation and company practice.”
One of the Guinness Trust’s objectives for using elearning was to be able to completely develop their own courses. If, however, you would prefer not to start completely from scratch, the Perform tools work well to customise Jenison’s new range of management courseware Management Milestones - Essentials. Having been developed using Perform any changes or additions that will make the course specific and more appropriate to your organisation are easy to add. The easy-to-use template based structure means that courses can be developed without needing any programming skills.
Guinness Trust are also members of the Charity Learning Consortium, a network formed to provide support between voluntary organisations to take advantage of cost-effective, market-leading elearning courses. For more information about using Perform to build your own courses or personalise others such as the Management Milestones Essentials range as well as other management and IT courses offered by Jenison and for further information about the Charity Learning Consortium, please contact Jenison.