Online Course Booking Success

We, and our customer County Kildare VEC, are delighted with the success of the new system. After the first two weeks, over 700 people have booked and paid online for night classes in County Kildare VEC. Our hope now is that other organisations providing training courses will purchase this brilliant new product !
Well it is our blog – nothing like a bit of self praise.

New Online Course Booking system due to go live

We are planning to go live with the above on 1st September and are doing the final testing. Kildare VEC are the first to offer this system from Salespulse. Anyone in County Kildare will be able to search over 300 courses and filter their selection by Education Centre, by Course Type and even by day of the week. In other words show me what computer courses are running on a Tuesday night in Naas.

Once the person decides on the course, they can book and pay for it with credit card or laser card. They will get an email confirmation and Kildare VEC can even send a text to the class before it starts to remind students of starting time. Once someone registers they will be given a password and they can log in at any stage to see what they have booked and also what courses they have already completed.

Kildare VEC are hoping that they will achieve a significant reduction in administration and paperwork while providing an enhanced service to the public. We are delighted to be working with them to develop what we hope will be an excellent facility and case study.

New facility for Adult Literacy Product

For users of our Adult Literacy management system we have added a key new feature. Many VECs run ITABE (Intensive Tuition in Adult Basic Education) programmes. Our system has been adapted to let you manage this programme. Once your information has been entered properly you can now generate ITABE returns with one click.

This new feature is provided freely as part of the hosting & support contract.  More details here.

New Timesaving facility for Users of our Education System

Our Adult Education system has a new facility that lets users to select a date range and with one click can generate personal letter to all learners who are due to start a new class during that time. It will tell them when and where the class is and also the time of the class. Users can read about this and many other updates here.

Night Class Software

We have recently written to all of our VEC customers informing them of the new system which they can use for online registrations for nightclasses for this September.  Demo available here .
The VEC can maintain the list of classes while members of the public can search & register for classes.
Any comments on the functionality that VECs (or other potential customers) would like would be very welcome.

Community E-Learning

We have Learning Managment systems installed with 25 Vocational Education Committees in Ireland to manage their Adult Learning. We engaged with some customers during the week to look at supporting the learning process using some elearning supports. There are obviously more challenges implementing elearning in a community environment rather than a corporate environment so any comments or throughts on this would be appreciated. We will be researching this area further and I will update this post with any findings.

Training Survey

During January we undertook a survey of our Adult Education Product users to identify what the training needs were. We were delighted with the response and it has helped us to identify the training courses we will run over the next few months. Mid February we will have the facility to let users book courses online.

We recently ran the first of our tailored training sessions for 2009 in the Teachers Training Centre in Kilkenny and found the venue and service excellent.

Read more details of our survey results and some recent feedback from participants here.

We would encourage anyone that wants additional training in any of our products to add a comment to this post.

Adult Education & Salespulse

Adult Education is a significant industry in Ireland as it is in many economies. It takes the form of short training courses, Education programmes, Literacy training, Adult Guidance. It is delivered in commercial training organisations, community education environments, in employment situations & online to name but a few.

 

We are a significant player in this sector in Ireland having a system deployed nationally to manage Community Adult Guidance as well as a number of administration systems being used by over 1,000 users. The products we have include Learning Management Systems, Online testing, Online questionnaires, Student registration systems, Text a student facility and timetabling.

 

I will use this blog to discuss individual aspects of software for the Adult Education sector. I will talk about some case studies in general terms and would hope to get feedback from any parties interested in this area.