Here at RAND Worldwide, we provide training, consulting, and technical support to companies using CAD software applications, such as AutoCAD, Inventor, CATIA, and Pro/ENGINEER. We've provided various eLearning solutions for about 10 years; however, we recognized a while back that offering content in the context of online courses was not always the right solution for our typical audience—engineers and designers who are under time constraints and need to know how to do something specific in the software “right now”. The built-in help systems in CAD applications are typically acceptable for definitions and high-level overviews, but they are not a great source of “how to” information and are certainly not developed from an educational perspective. We recognized that our industry needed a performance support system that enabled end-users of CAD applications to access training content at a granular level. This ability would enable them to close knowledge or skill gaps that were preventing them from doing their job.
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We developed and used a homegrown solution for a number of years, but decided that sustaining a learning management system was not part of our core business. Enter Desire2Learn.
In our system, we call the LOR tool SOLO, which is an acronym for Searchable Online Learning Objects. We've marketed it as the foundation for our eLearning solution. A widget on the home page displays the LOR tool prominently, so that users see the search field as soon as they log in. Because our clients all use different applications as well as different versions of them, we've created separate LORs for each application and each version. Today, we have over 25 LORs containing more than 20,000 learning objects for 15 different CAD-related software applications (each company using our system would typically have access to five or less LORs for the specific applications they use). As an example, an AutoCAD user who logs into our system can quickly search for a term (e.g., “dynamic blocks”) and access any number of individual learning objects. A learning object may provide step-by-step information on common tasks (e.g., how to author, edit, or insert dynamic block blocks). Others may present hands-on exercises and projects that let the user practice before performing tasks on production CAD data.
Many of our clients also have their own CAD-related content that documents best practices and preferred methodologies for how their employees should create and manipulate design data in these applications. We intend to eventually create private LORs that companies can use to make internal documentation available to their people and perhaps even allow them to add content. Our system, called ProductivityNOW, then becomes a valuable tool for clients to capture and share knowledge internally and gives their people a central location to go to for CAD-related resources. To take it a step further, clients with significant LOR content could even make available or license their private LOR content to other companies subscribing to ProductivityNOW, thereby turning their accumulated knowledge into a source of revenue for them.
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As the name ProductivityNOW suggests, our goal is to keep our clients productive and successful with their engineering design applications. Desire2Learn's LOR enables us to make our content easily accessible to our clients in a self-service format, which will keep their employees productive and ultimately more self-sufficient. We are continuing to work on streamlining how we publish content into the LOR and how we manage LOR trusts. As we do so, we will be suggesting new features, which Desire2Learn has been very open to receiving. Overall, we see a lot of potential with this tool for us and for our clients.
