Why employee development matters

Here's a link to an interesting report on the subject of employee development from Mind Leaders.

Why Employee Development Matters

There are some worthwhile conclusions drawn from the document, which come out broadly in favour of adopting a blended learning approach. There's also a useful list of elements to look for in your company which will help if you are looking to set up an employee devlelopment programme.
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The Ten Commandments of e-learning

A good blog post from Cath Ellis outlining the ten commandments of e-learning.

The first one sums up a lot of my thoughts in the debate about e-learning; it's not the solution to all our problems, it's not a flash-in-the-pan, it's not going to revolutionise training and development in the short to medium term. It is however an incredibly useful option to have available to you.

1 Put the pedagogy (not the technology) first
Think about what students need to learn then think about how it is best for them to learn it. Only then think about which technology is best used to accomplish this.
Don’t be too ambitious. Start out small (eg. just a discussion board or a group blog) and build on this in subsequent years.

cathellis13: Ten Commandments of e-learning
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Blog: e-Learning help

E-learning is one of the bigger topics in Training and Development circles at the moment. Some are claiming it is sounding the death knell for traditional classroom training, others are of the opinion that it's a flash in the pan that wont last the course. It can get a bit heated as this TrainingZone article demonstrates.

I"m of the opinion that e-learning is a an exciting new frontier for trainers and instructional designers. I'm only playing on the fringes at the moment (my budget wont stretch to a proper implementation) and I'm about to start some limited application with a Senior Management Development Programme that I'll be rolling out in my organisation shortly. It will increasingly play a more and more important part in blended learning programmes.

I've found the WWW incredibly useful as a starting point for researching and trialling some of the applications that are out there, and two blogs in particular are worth recommending for anyone who is dipping their toes in the e-learning river.

e4innovation is by Grainne Cronel who is Professor of e-learning at the Open University.

Jane's e-learning Tip of the Day comes from Jane Hart, a social media and learning consultant.

Both have been incredibly useful to me as I've tried to get my head around the thousands of e-learning possibilities.