BURY ST. EDMUNDS, SUFFOLK, UNITED KINGDOM – (April 12, 2006) – The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence has adopted Course Genie to facilitate its online training program, Horizon Wimba announced today. Course Genie will enable the Ministry of Defence to satisfy an immediate need to deploy cultural awareness content to personnel in Iraq and to provide updates in legislation to individuals in operational theatres.
Course Genie is a software application which enables trainers and instructors to quickly and easily convert their Microsoft Word documents into content for online courses.
While the majority of all U.K. military courses have e-content developed over weeks and months by commercial organisations, Defence often needs to deliver materials overnight to audiences in very remote locations. As this normal content development cycle does not allow for rapid content creation, Course Genie will enable military training personnel to quickly and easily convert existing Word documents into e-learning content in order to meet these tight deadlines.
“Having reviewed a great many products for rapid development, it became
obvious that the end-user was more comfortable with Microsoft Office Suite of applications than they would be with Macromedia or Adobe products for specialist
content development,” said Major Chris Edwards AGC (ETS), Training Development Officer, Training Advisory Group, Ministry of Defence. “With Word as the single most popular application in Defence, it made perfect sense to find a tool that could take Word documents and convert them to a SCORM-compliant package. Course Genie was by far the best in the field, which is why we purchased it.”
Besides being able to quickly create e-learning content, Defence will also be able to track who has accessed the content, how long they have spent reading the content, and via their LMS, will even be able to assess their learners’ knowledge and understanding. Major Edwards also commented that Course Genie’s ease-of-use makes it a great mechanism for non-technical subject matter experts to develop accurate content in a timely fashion.
Finally, Course Genie will enable the Ministry of Defence to meet a new government mandate which states that all training across the Defence community must have a minimum of 25% e-learning content as part of the overall training solution.