Red River College, Verilogue, Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation from Canada join our international eLearning community. Banpais, from Honduras and Clinica Biblica and Poder Judicial from Costa Rica. Welcome all to the SHIFT elearning community.

We strive to maintain our commitment to always offer you an innovative eLearning authoring tool, that's why every month we release a set of improvements and this month is no exception. Below are the improvements and updates we made in August, if you have any questions please contact us.

UK eLearning consultant Clive Shepard recently discussed Shift on Clive on Learning. He talks about our model as a real plus to eLearning developers: But what's interesting about this tool is not that it's web-based, but in the commercial model: Purchasers have completely free access to the tool to develop content. MindMuze (North American Distributors) are proactive in providing support and advice to help you both creatively and technically in coming up with effective content. You pay only when you publish content, on the basis of the number of 'pages' in the content. This is an output-oriented model, so MindMuze has every incentive to help you make productive use of the tool. Why? Because they make money from what you produce rather than from the product sitting on the shelf. In adopting this model, MindMuze are taking on a lot more of the commercial risk. They are also demonstrating a great deal of confidence in their product. With our new Brandon Hall Awards, we are definitely confident about SHIFT - more details coming soon!

Author: Andrea Cruz, Implementation and Support Manager Some of the activities we suggest for a successful eLearning strategy implementation include: 1. Corporate objective training: the implementation should have clear objectives, but they should be aligned with corporate objectives. Otherwise, the eLearning project could become an isolated effort, and achieving expected results would be impossible. This could even wipe out the project in the early stages 2.Corporate culture training: the organizational culture should be considered because it can be modified as a result of change, and employees could miss benefits and care provided by traditional methods. It is important to keep users posted on the new benefits resulting from eLearning and develop a contingency plan in case of change resistance. 3.Management or department levels in charge of user training: getting management involved in the training makes it easy to achieve greater employee commitment. Moreover, it is part of an overall planning that if it maintains a good communication with organizational objectives, it will become a more difficult chain to be broken. 4.Start training with firm leaders: (remember that leaders are not necessarily linked to positions but to their personality and characteristics since they are natural leaders followed by their colleagues). Preferably, these leaders should not belong to the training department. 5.Easy training access: occasionally, technological investment is needed to provide the organization with adequate training infrastructure and offer the best access to students. 6.Policies and Procedures: defining project boundaries, guidelines, and scope is related to the definition of policies and procedures used in training development. 7.Training on competencies and partner personal development: using eLearning training for the benefit of employee competencies and real needs helps the user enjoy the use of a new method, 8.eLearning internal marketing: depending on the organization, it is necessary to use different ways of marketing the methodology, especially when it is something new. eLearning marketing helps to create expectations about the training, motivate, and provide information on the topic. 9. Follow-up: Methodology use and acceptance should be evaluated. Moreover, there should be an assessment to determine whether users are transferring the knowledge resulting from the training to their jobs. 10.Recognition: it can be part of the methodology marketing, but it is important for the employee to feel motivated and be recognized as a result of the training. The recognition could be group-based, i.e., departmental, as to create healthy competition within the organization.

A short interview with eLearning specialist Mark Sheppard about what it's like to work with SHIFT:

eLearning Specialist Nina Antonakes tried SHIFT -- and liked it! Here she discusses her experience.