Student Story: Keith Kearney

I am currently working in Learning & Development for a company with over 7,000 staff across 12 countries. This gives us a huge audience for our Learning Management System. I joined the team in January 2020. Prior to this I was working in IT support and had zero experience with eLearning.

In May of 2020, I started the Professional Certificate course and in January of 2021, I enrolled in the Advanced Digital Learning Design Course. The Certificate course thought me everything I needed to know to start my eLearning career. This includes design and development, demos on using specific programmes and even what to do once your courses are live on your Learning Management System.

The course provided me with a clear framework to create and implement effective eLearning. I am regularly referring to this course when planning new training. It helped me eliminate all the basic mistakes that I made in my first few weeks in Learning & Development.

The advanced course allowed me to take the skills I had previously learned and develop them further. It covers several different areas in detail and will teach you how to take your eLearning courses to the next level.

Guest speakers were also present throughout both courses to talk about different areas of eLearning. I found this to be very informative as it shows how the theory you are learning works in a real-life setting. Additionally, John and Stefan provided us with lots of external resources if there was an area we wanted to study further. They were also always available to answer any questions or provide advice.

The LMS is still a new tool in our organisation. Our aim is to grow it across the company by getting more people taking and requesting courses. The tools thought in both courses have greatly helped us to do this. There is a particular focus on making eLearning interactive and keeping the user engaged and interested. We are seeing increases in the number of people showing interest in our LMS because of us implementing these learnings.

Overall, both the programmes have proved very beneficial to our Learning & Development team. Especially as Covid-19 has forced all our training to move online, our company has not had to slow down employee development.