Last fall a connection of mine told me about the Canada-B.C. Job Grant, a pot of money available to B.C. employers to “support skills training for their current and new employees”. Since I employ myself in my own business, I was happily able to take advantage of this grant to do some professional development related to creating e-learning courses.
With help from the grant funds (they paid 80% of the cost) I took the E-Learning Instructional Design Certificate from ATD, the Association for Talent Development in the U.S. It was a four week long, three hour a week synchronous online course on the Web Ex platform. I enjoyed the course as much for their modelling of good synchronous online facilitation as I did the content and activities they asked us to engage in. Three hours sitting at my desk with just one ten-minute break is a long go, and the instructor (a skillful facilitator with connections to Allen Interactions) did a fairly good job at keeping the level of engagement high throughout.
The course was focused on creating self-study e-learning courses, such as those I create with Articulate Storyline (see recent example). I had to make a case to the Canada-B.C. job grant folks to allow me to take the course outside of B.C. as I haven’t yet found a course in B.C. that teaches people instructional design for this type of online course creation. The course was well worth it; I feel like I have ‘upped’ my game even more to design really engaging and effective e-learning courses for my clients.
I may blog about the actual content of the course another time but for now I wanted to alert people who live here in B.C. that another round of funding has been made available for this grant and you can find out more about it here on their website. Take a look at their eligibility criteria and good luck!
