As we all seem to be more than ever pressed for time, improving our skills through training seems harder to do. eLearning has advanced to help overcome the obstacles of time away, travel and living costs, etc. by bringing it to us over the Internet—if we can squeeze a window of focused time required for effective learning.
Process manufacturers in their pursuit of financial stability have squeezed many areas of their businesses including their operations staff levels. This makes time away for training even more difficult.
I’ve discussed in earlier posts some of the innovations Emerson’s Educational Services has been doing to meet the needs given these trends. They recently announced the DeltaV Operator eLearning program to provide this training over the Internet for those who enroll to receive this training.
I caught up with Instructor Troy Nelson who put together this eLearning curriculum for Operators. He cited some interesting facts from a St. John’s University study on adult learning which said 45% of us are primarily hands-on learners (kinesthetic learning), 30% are visual learners, and the remaining 25% are audio learners.
With this in mind, Troy and the team designed the Operator eLearning curriculum with over 50 demonstration videos, interactive practice sessions, and interactive workshops to provide for various ways we learn. And audio runs throughout these sessions to cover those audio learners.
Troy also felt it was important to keep each lesson to about 15 minutes to keep the lesson focused and keep the participant’s attention. Even though the full curriculum takes a little over a day (or a long day for those motivated folks), each enrolled student has three months to access the material as often as they would like.
You can see a quick preview of an Operator lesson here.
