Online Education as Good as Traditional?

A recent New York Times article caught our attention. The article is about research that was done over a period of 12 years about the effectiveness of online education in K12 and college settings. The study set out to answer a question on many people’s minds – does online education work as well as classroom education?

According to the results, the answer is “yes, even better”. There were some interesting findings that came out of the 99 studies, including that the report found that “online education could be set to expand sharply as evidence mounts of its value.”

Read the full New York Times article here.

Have you ever taken online courses? How were they different from classes you have taken in person? Do you prefer one method over the other? Why?

Certification Journey Continued

Okay, so I have an update on my certification journey. I am at a stand still and need to get moving back in the direction of certification. My semester for grad school started, and that coupled with working here at LearnKey full-time have stalled my certification efforts.

That said, certification is still something that is very important to me and it is still something that I am going to achieve. I need to quit making excuses! It is easy to make excuses when you set a goal and somehow you are not accomplishing things as fast as you thought you would. It’s like the ten… okay maybe 20 pounds we all say we will lose after New Year’s, and then the next year rolls around and that pesky ten pounds is still there, plus five extra.

Certification is something I see value in, so I am resolving to work on it this weekend, even if I just spend 15 minutes in the LearnKey Word 2010 training. Just the other day, I heard a story about a woman who had applied for a job and out of the stack of applicants she was chosen because she had a Microsoft Office certification that set her apart from the rest of the applicants. In a tough job market, certification can differentiate you from all of the other people looking. It is stories like these that motivate me to continue on in my certification journey!

Edit from Colin: In light of this recent news about Allacyn’s certification journey, I assure you, we’ve given her a sigh and a stern look of disappointment, and there might have been a sad face thrown in there too. I’ve also given her a deadline of October 4th to update us on her progress, so keep an eye out for that coming up soon!

Learning HTML 5 Fundamentals

I am a web developer at LearnKey. I do a lot of back end scripting as well as work with HTML and CSS on a daily basis. I have been doing development for about 5 years now and grew up on good ol’ HTML4. In an effort to update my skill-set and learn a little bit more; I decided to take the training that LearnKey has put out on coding in HTML 5, and tell you about my experience.

Continue reading “Learning HTML 5 Fundamentals”

LearnKey Summer Giveaway: Thanks for participating!

Our giveaway on Facebook has officially ended as of Thursday 9/15. Thanks to everyone who participated and shared with their friends and family, and congratulations to everyone who won prizes!

Grand Prize Winner

Our Grand Prize winner was Michael Cruz. Michael won an Acer Aspire laptop bundled with our A+ 2009 (course + 2011 updates) series. He was also the first winner back when we started our giveaway, winning a $50 Amazon gift card. Being one of the most active and earning more entries than almost everyone who participated, it goes to show that participation can definitely help your odds!

Second Prize Winners

Kevin Gensel: $25 Amazon gift card
Patrick Gutierrez: $50 Amazon gift card
Mike Elder: $25 Amazon gift card
Taylor Manuele: Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch input tablet
Richard Ponce: $25 Amazon gift card
Becky Gardner: Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Student with Office 2010 training
Corey Krumpelman: $50 Amazon gift card
Julie Smith: $50 Amazon gift card
alisha snyder: $25 Amazon gift card
Logan Hall: Western Digital 1TB external hard drive

Once again, thank you to everyone who participated. Be sure to keep an eye out for future promotions!

A Day in the Life of LearnKey’s Graphic Designer.

Hello, I’m Kari. I have the pleasure of designing wonderful marketing pieces for LearnKey. I also have the not so glamorous job of creating and updating the packaging and silks. Do you know what silks are? I didn’t when I first started to work here. Silks are the images printed directly on a CD, for our Video Courseware. Due to the re-organization of our company, I was recently asked to update the packaging and silks… all thousand or two of them.

The silks are .png files and aren’t directly editable, so each one has to be recreated from a template with the necessary updates and re-saved as a .png before being handed off to the printer. I created a new template in Adobe Illustrator with current information. I then have to change the title, product code and session number, before exporting the file as a .png for each silk. There are thousands of silks that need to be done, and due to the monotony and the sheer number of course numbers and sessions involved, the margin for error is high. (I am a graphic designer, doing the same thing over and over again shuts my brain completely off, but don’t tell my boss).

Continue reading “A Day in the Life of LearnKey’s Graphic Designer.”

LearnKey – You’ve got Talent

It is absolutely amazing what a great team we have at LearnKey! Over the past three weeks I have had a blast traveling throughout Utah between Salt Lake City, Cedar City and St. George getting to know each and every team member.

The talent is unbelievable. Starting with our production studios in Salt Lake City, if you want to get a taste of what they do then be sure to check out our A+ Certification 2009 course; its one of the most popular in the industry.

After they shoot the video, then its up to the brilliant group of elearning video designers and technical writers in our Cedar City office, led by Wyett, that make it all come together. After my first visit the design team put together a list of ideas in how we can deliver a better video delivery experience for our customers – is that cool or what? Wait till they get more familiar with our newest partner LearnCast and learn about the opportunities this great mobile platform will create for everyone in the company. Really going to be exciting.

Of course when talking about talent at LearnKey, there is no way I can close this message without giving major props to our St. George headquarters, especially for a flawless roll out of our OnlineExpert v6 release. It really is a reflection of good people working together for one cause, which is to provide the best user/customer experience we possibly can.

My number one priority is to ensure our leadership team fosters a culture focused on “employee first” values around Trust, Value and Ease. John, Lori and Dave are totally on board and holding me accountable to do that everyday. Who are they? More to come so stay tuned!

Dreamforce 2011

This week I got the great honor to attend Dreamforce 2011. For those of you who don’t know, Dreamforce is the annual conference that Salesforce holds. The conference takes place in San Francisco where Salesforce is headquartered, and this year it drew a crowd of 45,000+ attendees. This is a fun, but long week with classes filling your days and exciting networking events taking up your nights.

The highlights so far: Metallica concert (I won’t be able to hear for a month), the exciting new Salesforce innovations that were announced at the conference, and the breakout session Set the Social Road Map for Your Company (Gary Vaynerchuck of VaynerMedia was refreshing). I am really excited about all of the great things I am learning here, and I am looking forward to bringing back some great ideas to LearnKey.

OnlineExpert Helps Teachers with Increased Accountability

I am glad to be back in the office after a whirlwind travel week and on location training. Only nine airports in five days, but I did manage to sneak over to the beach for five minutes for this picture:

This was an informative trip, and it gave me insight about what teachers need for their students in the 2011-2012 school year. They expressed concerns that they are more accountable than ever this year when it comes to getting their students industry certified. It was an added bonus in the past for their students to achieve industry certifications. Now these programs are being measured, and programs could be cut if a large percentage of students don’t pass these exams.

Continue reading “OnlineExpert Helps Teachers with Increased Accountability”

Make Your Resume Pop

I saw this interesting infographic the other day and it got my mind spinning. The infographic was all about the new era of résumés and cover letters. So apparently what we learned about creating a résumé and cover letter might not work anymore. Here are the tips to help you land that new gig.

See the full image at Daily Infographic.

What do you think? Does it make sense to use this new advice to create a stand out résumé? Is this modern résumé more applicable in some careers over others? Do you think potential employers will notice you more, or do you think it will turn them off because it is too far from the norm?

Certification Journey: Moving along slowly

I saw that our Word 2010 course was only three sessions long, and I thought to myself, “This is going to be easy, and I will be ready to take my certification test in no time!” Well, procrastination is one thing I am very good at, so it has taken me longer to get started than I thought it would.

Finally last night after a long day at work, I made myself open up the training and get started (this was due in large part to the fact that there was nothing decent on TV).

In our training, we have this great feature: the Pretest. This kind of acts like a gauge to let you know how much knowledge you already have about the information in the course, and what areas you will need to focus on. I looked at the pretest and thought to myself, “Not a problem. I am going to ace this test in about 10 minutes and then I can back to reading my book.” My reasoning behind this thought was that I have been using Word since my high school days, and now I use Word pretty much every single day at work. Well, I had another thing coming to me. I went through the test in about 15 minutes, but as I did, the realization slowly crept in on me that I had no clue. There were a lot of terms I did not know and a lot of features I was clueless about. At the end of the pretest, when the results said I failed, I was pretty disappointed in myself and a little nervous about the challenge I was taking on.

The good thing is, I realized I have a long way to go to learn everything there is to know about Word, which worked as a motivator. So with this in mind, I started looking through the resources section of our training and looked at the glossary to find the definitions of many of the terms I had missed on the pretest. My lack of knowledge also made me think that this is something I really need to do so that I can function more efficiently in Word at work. So I am making the commitment to continue to make progress on this journey every week. I’ll keep you posted on my progress! If you are currently on your own certification journey, let us know how it is going for you, and any achievements or set backs you have faced trying to get certified.