TrainingMagazine.com

The U.S. government requires certain of its employees to maintain relevant skills, and to periodically demonstrate evidence of that training.  For example, continuing education units (CEUs) are accepted as proof of training the government recognizes.  

Most of the excitement and interest in eLearning has been in the ability for technology to connect students with teachers, and to automate elements of the teaching process - like the grading of exams online, for example.  But there's a key element of the eLearning experience that is somewhat lacking overall, and that's the serendipitous networking that occurs in any physical in-person educational experience.  In some schools, particularly the most prestigious, it's often the people you meet and the contacts you make in school that are almost as valuable as the education itself, pe

Here's a funny video of a teacher using his computer to play an April Fool's joke on his class.  Watch his "shadow" closely...

The hot TED conferences came to PBS this week, for their first-ever television broadcast of one of their legendary conferences, and they chose the topic of education for the broadcast.

(TED, for those who don't know, is the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference series.  Many TED talks can be found online, it's a great series.)

A company called CAD Training Online announced this week that they are offering instructor-led training via online delivery for students of AutoCAD, software created by the company Autodesk.  The intent is to fully recreate the in-class student experience via an online delivery platform.  This is Autodesk's first official authorized online delivery training center.

A report this morning from the South China Morning Post states that a recent the trial surrounding a sex scandal in China has inadvertently revealed that non-Chinese teachers are given preferential hiring in China to an extreme degree.

The deputy director of the Beijing-based 21st Century Education Research Institute, Xiong Bingqi, is quoted in the article as saying "in many cases, foreigners with only a travel visa become teachers."

Reports out of India claim that teacher training there  "has almost collapsed".  Private companies are trying to fill the gap but "teachers trained by them are not even able to clear the teachers qualification exam." This is according to Ambarish Rai, national convener of the Right-To-Education (RTE) forum, as reported by Anjalo Ojha for IANS, a prominent wire service in India, and reported by several online news outlets.

The European Commission is concerned that teachers lack ICT skills.  (ICT stands for information and communication technology.)  According to an article published today (April 22, 2013) by the UK website IT Pro, the EC surveyed 27 countries in the European Union, and received over 190,000 responses.  The results including the following findings:

If you haven't yet heard of the Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, you will soon.  A MOOC is a course that is presented online in such a way that very large numbers of students are able to attend.  Naturally the student-teacher ratio is a bit skewed in a MOOC, but the concept is still being worked out and is yet to be matured.  But the interest is strong.  The first recognized MOOC seems to be a 2008 course that involved over 2200 students.

The future success of online training is directly tied to the availability of broadband Internet access, and the availability is not fully "there" yet.  Slate magazine looked at this issue in an interesting article titled "A Failling Grade for Broadband" (April 17, 2013), and it include this quote: