Guiding Star develops e-learning programs which can affordably deliver training through an online portal (which, through our software partnerships, we can help you with!) or from digital storage media (CD, DVD, memory stick). These e-learning programs, developed rapidly and fully turnkey, can dramatically reduce your training costs. They provide resources that can be used over and over again, creating consistency in message delivery. And they can easily be coupled with Ask the Expert forums and learning collaboration environments where learners can share and continue the learning.
Here are some of the services we can deliver to support learning mandates:
Learning Architecture / Andragogy - Our team, including our chorus of champions, has extensive experience with assessing learning needs, identifying learning gaps, and leveraging this information into interesting/novel architectures and approaches to closing those gaps. We ask the right questions, observe the current behaviors, understand how things are going wrong now, and build an approach, using robust methods and tools, to show you how we can overcome knowledge, skill and even attitude deficits. We've pioneered concepts and software for learner journey mapping. We concept learning programs that celebrate adult learning principles and practices. We identify valuable learning objectives/outcomes. And we identify the methods that should be used to close the gaps.
Editorial Planning - The Guiding Star team works with subject matter experts or, if so commissioned, on its own to move from an approved learning architecture to actual editorial planning. Our tried and true methods keep the burden light on the SMEs, but ensure that they are heard. Our approach typically generates a detailed Editorial Outline that shows what will be covered, the depth of coverage, and key points that ensure that learning outcomes are achieved by those participating in the learning.
Content Development/Acquisition - Our team can provide support - guidelines, tools, shortcuts - to enable a disseminated approach to content development. We also can provide research and writing talent to directly develop the content for a learning program. And with our access to tools like Slide Swarm, we can support multi-stakeholder review of emerging content so that your program reflects the best thinking of all of your team and, ideally, a sampling of learners. A big part of our work here is circling back to the learning architecture, to make sure that the important things - the approach and intended outcomes - can be fully achieved.
Multimedia Builds - For many mandates, our team uses common rapid e-learning tools to create memorable, interactive e-learning experiences. Through our chorus of champions and members of our team, we can acquire and edit all relevant audio, video and even animated video.
Custom Programming - In cases where required functionality to achieve architecture and interactivity outcomes isn't available via common rapid e-learning authoring tools, the Guiding Star team reaches out to chorus of champions technology experts to create something unique and custom-coded. We have full access to web development technologies that include gaming, HTML5, and the ability to create rich and even personalized interactivity.
Performance Aids - Our team believes that learning is a process, not an event, and that the best learning programs put into the hands of learners various performance aids that can serve to reinforce and remind of the learning outcomes and content corpus. We build performance aids; from simple "cheat sheets" to multimedia e-books and apps, we find the right messages and the right channels to support driving learning deep. One of our significant performance support tools is Case Swarm, an online social case study platform that helps learners apply knowledge and skills through exploration of the common (and challenging!) scenarios of work.
Knowledge Translation to Action - We believe that performance support is critical to learning return on investment. To that end, every learning program we concept will recommend approaches and tools to support the critical last mile - the transfer of knowledge from the minds of learners into actions that benefit the organization. Performance aids help this process. We are also big on periodic reinforcement of key concepts, and on introduction of methods/tools that call learners to account for what they have done as a result of their learning.
E-learning is a powerful and stimulating approach that greatly facilitates attitude and behavior change, going well beyond PowerPoint to appeal to all the senses, and that meets learner needs on-demand and on time. Insight. Gained. Shared.
While providing, through its web and software development partner, full capabilities for custom e-learning composing, Guiding Star makes the most of an elegant e-learning toolset: