Posts by Mike

We're currently developing bespoke e-learning content for the National Association of Providers of Activities for Older People (NAPA) to support their Level 2 QCF Award in Supporting Activity Provision in Social Care. We're also working with Tribal and the NAPA e-learning content is based on Tribal's existing supporting materials.

We're looking for PHP developers at the moment - permanent staff and also freelancers (ideally Sheffield based). We want people who are good team players, problem solvers and have a good working knowledge of PHP and web application/database development. We're particularly interested in people who've got recent experience of building large scale web applications with MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Vi Hart's quirky YouTube videos are a million miles away from the maths I remember doing at school - it seems like a different subject (which it probably is). I mostly enjoyed maths at school because solving problems in things like algebra, trigonometry and probability was satisfying (as long as you could solve them) but I don't ever remember thinking that maths was a creative subject - basically maths was (and I bet it still is for most kids) sums.

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.

We're pleased to announce the release of clickLearner - a new kind of video based e-learning and assessment solution that SkillsLogic have developed for the Sheffield based company of the same name.

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.

If you're a training provider and you're thinking about moving from paper based or face-to-face course delivery and into e-learning then hopefully this post will give you some food for thought.

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.

The Khan Academy is amazing. It's delivered almost 150 million online lesson, mostly in Mathematics but also other subjects such as the Sciences, Finance and American History. One of the intriguing things about the Khan Academy is the apparent simplicity of the content - the 3200 online lessons are all very simple videos, usually nothing more than founder Sal Khan talking while drawing on what's essentially just a blackboard.