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Asbestos Awareness elearning

Last week we launched our first online training module. It’s a one-hour Asbestos Awareness course aimed at making learners aware of the dangers of unknowingly coming into contact with asbestos. We built the course in partnership with Safety and Management Solutions Limited, health and safety consultants and training providers in Kent. It’s one of the first elearning courses to be accredited by UKATA, the UK Asbestos Training Association.

Why elearning?

This is a pretty simple question to answer. The benefits of taking an online course over attending its classroom version include:

• Anytime / anywhere – you can take this course whenever you have some spare time and it doesn’t matter if you’re in the office, at home, or even on your iPad onsite somewhere. Because it saves your progress data, you can complete it in stages at your convenience
• No travelling – often a training course that is only due to last an hour can take up the best part of a day. Travelling to and from a training provider’s office takes a big chunk out of your day
• It’s cheaper – the cost of taking an online course is substantially cheaper than its classroom equivalent. This doesn’t mean that the quality of learning is diminished in any way, it just means there are no overheads bumping the price up.
• Self-paced – if there’s part of the course you’d like to spend longer on, you can. You’re not dependent on other people in a classroom holding you up or forcing you to go too quickly. You learn at exactly the pace that suits you.

The learning

We took an existing classroom course that SAMS had been running for a number of years and redesigned it for elearning, drawing heavily on SAMS’ subject matter expertise. As elearning courses go, the Asbestos Awareness course is a fairly straightforward piece of knowledge transfer. It’s linear, meaning that the learner starts at page one and clicks through all the pages of the course until they reach the end. While this might not be as inspiring as an online role-play, it’s effective and it allows the learner to set their own pace.

The pages are broken up in to a mixture of telling, showing and doing – there’s a healthy mix of simple text-based knowledge transfer, case studies and real-life photographs, and interactive screens where users are invited to think in more depth about the content. Learners are also required to answer a set number of questions correctly. Rather than lump all these questions together at the end of the course, we have divided the course into sections each with a small quiz at the end.

This helps the flow of the course, makes the quiz part of the learning, and allows the learner to complete the course over multiple sessions if required. They can complete the quiz at the end of one session, log off, and resume from the start of the next section the next time they launch the course.
 

Some technical stuff

Some of the technical features of the course include:

• User progress is tracked across sessions – although the course isn’t long, you can do it in stages if you wish. If you complete a section and log out, the course will remember your progress and allow you to pick up from where you left off
• Auto generated certificates – as soon as you complete the course, your UKATA certificate is generated and available for you to download. The system also automatically emails you with a link for your records
• Learning management – we’ve built a simple learning management system to host the course. This will allow us to add more modules in the future
• Automatic renewal notices – as the certificate is only valid for a year, we’ve built in a notification system that automatically emails users whose certificates are about to expire
• Online payment and registration – the whole system is completely automatic. Users register and pay online and can access the learning immediately. There’s no waiting round for any human intervention.
• Online support – although the system is automatic, the support is completely human. We are building some FAQs as first line support but provide an email service with a guaranteed prompt response.

Next steps

We are already planning future modules with SAMS and expect to be rolling out a new course in the next couple of months. To find out more about this course, take a look at the Asbestos Awareness elearning page on SAMS’ website.