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Z Energy at Synapsys Breakfast Event 2020
Z Energy talks about the customer experience. Presenter: Julie Fitzgerald, Learning Operations Manager
RMPP at Synapsys Breakfast Event 2020
RMPP talk about sustainability productivity improvement. Presenter: Denise Bewsell, Specialist Extension Manager
Panel Discussion at Synapsys Breakfast Event 2020
Panel discussion which focuses on Covid and how it will affect the industry. Panelists: Mike Crossan, Executive General Manager Learning Services – Primary ITO David Glover, Executive Director – Partnerships Unitec Institute of Technology Julie Fitzgerald, Organisational Learning Manager – Z Energy NZ
Synapsys on partnering with DIA: NZLPP Project
“This programme is an exemplar for Synapsys in how genuine partnerships with our clients can contribute to significant positive impact across a sector in challenging times.” The Department of Internal Affairs (“DIA”) is New Zealand’s public service department, responsible for issuing documents like passports, citizenship grants, registering births and deaths, and more. They also advise…
The National Library builds capability and stronger communities during tough times with the NZLPP
The National Library’s NZ Libraries Partnership Programme is supporting librarians and library services to be retained during Covid-19, at the same time ensuring librarians play a key role in supporting their communities and people seeking jobs. A key part of this programme is upskilling librarians, so that they can provide greater support for library users…
Why we do user testing
There was an interesting piece about user testing in the Alertbox newsletter from NNG this week. I like to do a round of user testing on most learning-design projects, simultaneous with the second SME review. It needs to be after the first review, because the content should be complete and 90% final. The aim is…
Raising-the-bar on accessibility
We are excited to announce we are taking home an Initiative award for Accessibility at the 2021 NZATD Learning and Development Awards. The award acknowledges work that creates accessible learning and encourages best practice. We are receiving this award for the online module Demystifying Procurement, which we developed and built in collaboration with MBIE. The…
Consolidate your systems for a streamlined, integrated experience.
Picture the scene: you’re jumping online to complete a quick training module. You sign in to your emails to double check which course your manager recommended. You then log out, and log into your learning management system to take the course. After the course, you still have questions, so you email a colleague to ask…
Webby award finalist!
Wow! Pickled! – the microlearning we collaborated on with WorkSafe and AKQA last year – is a finalist for the Webby Awards in the Mobile Experience category! It’s great to see this international recognition of best-of-the-internet! From over 13,500 entries from over 70 countries, this nomination puts the Pickled! experience in the top 10%. Pretty…
How long does it take?
One of the first conversations we have with many of our clients starts like this: I’ve already done a full learning needs analysis and gathered all the content; how fast can you develop an e-learning module for me? People seem quite surprised when we still want to go through a Discovery process before giving a…
Shining with Rise
In the last few months, we’ve worked with several clients
to make e-learning modules in Articulate Rise, where previously we would have
used Storyline.
Right now seems a good moment to look back and think about what made Rise the best solution for these projects, how to get the most from it, and what pitfalls exist for the unwary.
ConCOVE
It’s great to see how the building blocks of the VET Sector reforms known as RoVE are starting to come together. Workforce Development Councils are taking shape, and the Construction and Infrastructure COVE is also underway. As an Associate to ConCOVE https://concove.ac.nz , we see the intended projects as pivotal to innovation in learning across the sector….
Pickled!
We are thrilled to have worked on the new WorkSafe/ACC gamified microlearning site ‘Pickled’, which went live on Friday!
Skills or resilience? You choose?
The 2020 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report is out. I’ve dipped into the chapter on Beyond reskilling; Investing in resilience for uncertain futures. If you have an interest in how your organisation can thrive in a world of accelerating change, you should read it. It suggests that the increasing pace of change probably makes the strategy of…
Bite-Sized Learning Solutions
So Microlearning is a big deal these days and if you’re still using your Learning Management System (or LMS) and standard e-learning tools to produce SCORM-type learning you’re probably not doing it in the most cost-effective or efficient manner. At Synapsys we’ve teamed up with industry-leading systems to be able to offer great ways to…
LTIG – 11th June 2019 – Christchurch Event
We’ve covered some interesting topics at the Learning Technology Interest Group over the last few sessions like Learning Design and Learning Experience Design. Few are more topical than microlearning though, and for our next session we’ll be looking at how ‘badging’ and micro-credentials tie in with bite-sized learning. Recently we published a piece on Practical…
Practical Microlearning
Microlearning isn’t just about taking your large learning objects or courses and breaking them into smaller ones. Microlearning is small but self-contained pieces of learning. With our fast paced world and lack of time to spend more than a few minutes learning before performing tasks, microlearning is a must-have for most modern businesses. The problem…
Knowledge Management rides again?
Remember the Knowledge Management wave that moved through in the early ’90s? Large repositories of live shared process documents that gave everyone a shared view of how things were done…. Whatever happened? LMSs came along, instructional content was easier to digest and maybe more effective… Perhaps it’s time in the L&D space has come again…
Notes from the Learning Technology Group
Learning Technology Interest Group (LTIG) in Christchurch is a collaborative group in the region made up of people and organisations with a strong interest in leveraging technology to improve learning in their organisations. Synapsys plays a pivotal role in the group, by organising the events and communications of the group and encouraging members to present,…
EdTech Christchurch Launch
We were delighted to lead the South Island launch of Edtech on Tuesday 6th. A large group braved ugly weather to hear from a panel representing the education, government and corporate sectors talk about challenges and successes we all share in the space of learning technologies. Genuine access and engagement continue to be challenges. It’s…
We have the technology, do we know what to do with it?
As always, the Deliotte Global Human Capital Trends challenges and informs the L&D sector. Careers and Learning is now the number two priority, well ahead of leadership development, digital platforms and analytics. Careers now average 60 years, jobs 4-5 years, and the half-life of a learned skill is now 5 years. Do the maths. We’re…
Immersive Learning; Not just the look
The trends in gaming are often a great indicator for learning design too. More recently we’ve seen a massive pull towards the AR/VR world with an emphasis on an immersive experience. Recently Synapsys worked with one of our partners looking at how we can provide more immersive virtual reality utilising a high-end headset. Immersive is…
Engaging your team with system change: no frills, big impact
Last month I was running a requirements workshop with a Synapsys client who are at the start of their journey with Learning Management Systems. For the uninitiated, a requirements workshop aims to pull together all the different things that an organisation wants its system to do. It’s not about the functionality of a LMS but…
Practical Augmented Reality becomes… reality
Augumented Reality (AR) made it into the mainstream almost overnight with 2016’s Pokemon Go mobile game. That fad seems to be well and truly over for all but a committed few, and the costs at the time put it out of reach for more practical applications. Now Apple and Google have both recently released free…
Digestible Analytics in Business and Learning Systems
Analytics are great aren’t they? The ability to really track real-time data at a depth and level to give you all the information you could possibly want. Ask a data person how much data is too much and that’s like asking a graphic artist how much resolution is too much. But for the rest of…
LinkedIn 2017 Workplace Learning Report
The LinkedIn 2017 Workplace Learning Report put together by Britt Andreatta is worth a look if you are interested in: Workplace learning trends What areas L&D programmes are focusing on The Grenier Curve for thinking about your organisation’s stage of growth and the next transformation it’s likely to go through. It’s drawn from North American…
Engaging learners through interactive video
Many people are already using video to deliver training, but traditional video can only go so far to meet learning needs. Interactive video, where questions, branching, and other interactions can be added to enhance the experience, has been becoming more mainstream and easier to create in the past couple of years. We’ve been particularly impressed…
New Staff On-board: July 2017
We warmly welcome Karen Gillie and Nigel Young to our team at Synapsys. A former lecturer in adult learning, Karen has been designing workplace L&D for most of her career. She has extensive experience in matching technology to organisational requirements and is responsible for managing our LMS implementation projects. Nigel has over 20 years’ experience…
Notes from ATD Atlanta 2017
With over 10,000 attendees and hundreds of presenters and vendors, nobody sees everything at ATD. Here are a random collection of ideas and tools that caught my attention. Evaluating learning impact From Tony Bingham’s conference welcome, IBM has sidelined big data analytics for measuring learning impact and gone to asking managers what they think…
Business Problems: Totara Solutions Workshop
Bebe and Phil ran a session on looking for technical solutions to business issues as part of the TotaraLMS conference last week. The focus of the session was to look at the issues and problems that workshop participants faced in their everyday work life. We flushed out a great range of issue – for example:…
Synapsys NZ appointed as provider on All-of-Government (AoG) Consultancy Services Panel
As part of the All-of-Government (AoG) Consultancy Services solution, New Zealand Government Procurement (NZGP) has established the Business and Finance category to offer eligible government agencies specialist advice and competitive solutions from a broad panel of experienced consultancies. Synapsys NZ Ltd is pleased to have been appointed as a panel provider in the Human…
Getting buy-in for measuring learning impact
I recently attended a webinar presented by Andy Webb from Applied.com on getting buy-in from your boss for learning measurement/ analytics projects. It’s worth a look here if you have time. If not, here are a few of my takeaways… Of course, your programme should be designed around your organisation’s KPIs, and you should measure…
Moving from workshops to blended learning
Many, many of our clients are looking to re-purpose workshop based learning programmes to a blended learning approach. There are numerous drivers. Cost of delivery is the most common one, closely followed by bottlenecks in availability of experts, and a concern around the lack of evidence of uptake and application of learning (“they attended, but…
ATD 2015 Panellists’ thoughts on ROI
Some thoughts from a panel on ROI at the ATD2015 conference comprising Rick de Rijk, James Kirkpatrick, Laura Paramoure and Shaun Riley… #1 We tend to frame programmes around curricula – the objectives we hope will deliver the change we’re looking for. If we framed them around the KPIs that defined success instead, we’d be…
Improving your development processes
For many organisations, a development process includes just the core of the product development cycle – the initial concepts or storyboards through to final deployment. But there are wider considerations within any development cycle that need to be addressed if you want to ensure your development process is the best it can be. There are…
Measuring the success of your initiatives
Whether you’re developing and delivering a learning initiative, or improving your L&D processes, we all know we should measure the success of what we’re doing. Clear benchmarks, clear goals, compelling evidence of the logic of us doing more with bigger budgets for the betterment of our organisation. Often we don’t though…. No benchmark to measure…
Inspirational Keynote from Sugata Mitra at ATD2015
Keynote speakers have a rare opportunity to shift thinking on a large scale. 10,000 registered for ATD2015, it looked like well over half attended Sugata’s session. He well and truly took his chance; this blogpost is no doubt a tiny part of the ripple that will spread out from the session. It doesn’t cover his…
Will LRSs replace LMSs?
Learning Records Stores are gaining traction because of their ability to track and report on informal or unstructured activity. Working with Experience API (also known as Tin Can and xAPI), LRSs provide rich data on learner activity as they move around outside of structured content typically put together and managed within LMSs. This leads some…
Global Human Capital Trends 2015; Deloitte University Press
This report from Deloitte puts Learning and Development as the third highest talent challenge facing organisations (from a survey pool of 3300 business in 106 countries). Sitting only behind culture and engagement and leadership, it got an average importance rating of 74/100. It’s up from 8th place last year. On the face of it, it’s…
Connection Culture by Michael L Stallard
Michael Stallard argues in Connection Culture that growing a ‘connection culture’ in your organisation gives competitive advantage. He argues that it helps productivity, innovation and staff retention, amongst other things. In support, he sites research that compared business units with engagement and connection scores in the bottom 25%, against others with the top 25%’s median…
Mastering Mobile Learning by Chad Udell & Gary Woodill
We all struggle to figure out how to fold new technologies into our learning experiences. It seems human nature to try and shoehorn the new tool into our existing paradigm, rather than ask how our paradigm could change. If this sounds familiar to you, Mastering Mobile Learning will be a useful tool to help you…
The New Social Learning, Tony Bingham & Marcia Conner
If you’re interested in understanding what Social Learning really is, and what it’s rationale might be, Chapter One gives you plenty to think about. There aren’t many recent trends the authors don’t touch on. Lean, BYOD, Gen Y and Millenials, 70/20/10, they’re all in there along with a strong underlying themes around passion, energy and…
Leveraging learning technologies for business impact
Summary of Retirement Villages Association Financial Sector Forum, October 2015 Presentation Recent research holds that Learning and Development has become a critical tool in meeting the global challenges in talent development.[1] We see common challenges across all sectors driving this; the need to adapt to change, retain staff, reduce cost, and find new revenue streams….