Posts on Education & Training

There are big plans to increase the number and quality of apprenticeships in the UK. In England the Government has committed to increase the number of apprenticeships to 3m by 2020 - that's 3m starts in 2020. At the same time the Government wants to raise quality.

The new course booking system that SkillsLogic developed for the Education and Training Foundation is a great example of how we work with a client to turn an initial set of broad requirements into a mission critical web application that delivers real value from the day it goes live.

Microsoft Power BI is a great solution for colleges (and other training organisations) that want to build and share business intelligence dashboards.

The Education and Training Foundation’s new course booking system - ETF Booking - has been designed and developed by SkillsLogic

Detailed financial information about FE colleges is published annually by the Skills Funding Agency and the Education Funding Agency. The latest available data - for the 2014/2015 academic year - is here in MS Excel format.

There's a lot of Skills Funding Agency data freely available of the web - much of it derived from the individualised learner record (ILR).

Microsoft Power BI is a good tool for making sense of what can be quite complex data. It's straightforward to build simple interactive visualisations that highlight patterns in the data and make it easier to spot trends. And sharing Power BI dashboards is also easy - at the moment Microsoft lets you share dashboards via a public url for free.

6th Davos Philanthropic Roundtable "RevolutiOnline.edu - Online Education Changing the World". A long video but worth watching if you're interested in education and new technology.

Usually when I'm at the checkout in Waitrose in Sheffield I get one of those little green tokens that you put in one of the three charity boxes near the exit. You read the label on each box and then use the token to vote for the local charity that you think should get a donation. It's a nice idea - it's always interesting to see which box contains the most green tokens and I guess it's a very effective and very visible (and tactile) way of making the customer aware of Waitrose's support for the local community.

Google+ is Google's answer to Facebook and Twitter. It lets you share posts, documents, photos and videos with ‘Followers'. Google say it's growing fast with over a 100m users and though it's got a way to go before it can match Facebook (800m) and Twitter (140m) for active users, it does have some great features: integration with other Google services like Google Apps and YouTube; really great photo sharing (photos look great in the brilliant mobile app); and Google+ ‘Pages' - standalone ‘Pages' linked to a Google+ account that you can use to promote your company or brand online.

More news this week from the US about free online access to university courses. This time Coursera, the online platform created by two academics from Stanford, announced that a new bunch of universities including the University of Edinburgh have signed up to make some of their courses available on the platform.