E-learning solutions for process industries

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Geography is history. Learning can be anywhere, anytime at your convenience.

The types of solutions

An e- learning solution can be either off the shelf courses or a custom designed course or something in between.

Off the shelf courses

You can find several excellently designed off-the-shelf courses in several topic areas all over the world. These include a variety of topics like Hazardous Area Instrumentation, Safety Instrumented Systems, Gas Monitors and RFID.

Custom Designed courses

A custom designed course has to be designed keeping in mind the audience, goals of the course, time allotted to the course and testing requirements. You should ensure that a custom designed course provider can provide to you all these resources at competitive costs. Generally a custom designed course will be much more expensive than an off the shelf course.

Customized Off the Shelf courses

In the case of some e-learning providers, it may also be possible to take one of their standard, off the shelf courses and customize it (fine tune it) to meet the special needs of your own organization. Check whether your e-learning course provider can offer this option (by the way, Abhisam Software can offer this option).

Use the right tools

There are two ways to produce an e-learning course. One way (the older way) is make a course which is a hard-coded in software which typically runs like a movie. Once produced it is difficult (and expensive) to make changes or to upgrade a course.

The second way is to use an authoring tool for production of the course. Usage of authoring tools makes it easier to make changes and modifications in the course with the passage of time (to produce better or newer versions of same course). Ensure that your custom e-learning service provider uses the right authoring tools.

Going beyond traditional courses-Electronic Learning Manuals (Not just e-books!)

One should think of going beyond just traditional courses and putting all of your company's user manuals, procedures, maintenance manuals and installation guides into e-learning modules. This is especially useful for companies who sell capital equipment and need to train their customers thoroughly. Instead of supplying a staid user manual (with perhaps a three day course thrown in for good measure), it would be a better option to convert all this knowledge into an e- learning module which can then be used teach everybody who needs to know it anytime.

Please note that we are not talking here of e-books or e-manuals, which could be just soft copies or even scanned copies of the same dull manuals! A full fledged e-learning course would have animations, simulations and interactive exercises that help the learner grasp complex subjects very easily. Note that some providers can design very good e-books (which are not just pdf files) but include rich graphics and animations too, with page turning and the ability to read on mobile devices such as Android tablets. Ask Abhisam Software for such e-book samples.

Example 1: Say, your company makes an oil fired heater and needs to train the customers in its operation. What better way to train them, than do it through an e-learning course, which through the right combination of text matter, graphics , animation and sound can create quite a lasting impact. This kind of audio-visual training has better retention amongst plant operators than going through a dull manual, that nobody would read on their own!

Example 2: An engineering company wants to train its engineers and designers in hazardous area instrumentation, including area classification, designing intrinsically safe instrument loops and so on. Rather than sending a few of them to a training institute, it can simply download the Hazardous Area Instrumentation course and ask employees to take it. After the course the employees simply login to a web based system, take an online test and get certified. The records are available for archiving purposes to the company.

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