Disability charity Leonard Cheshire joins e-learning consortium
Leonard Cheshire, the UK's leading disability care charity, has
joined an e-learning consortium with five other charities.
The charity has 8,000 employees spread across 150 sites in 10 UK
regions. The diversity of the sites makes it a time-consuming and
costly proposition to bring people together for training.
"We used to provide classroom training at off-site venues," said
Craig Brown, Leonard Cheshire's IT training manager. "Because our
staff are geographically dispersed, the cost of training was always
swollen by travel and accommodation expenses."
In 2002, Leonard Cheshire was approached to join a consortium of
charities being set up by three e-learning specialists: Jenison,
KnowledgePool and Kognita.
As part of the consortium, each charity gets Microsoft Office and
European computer driving licence training courses, together with
KnowledgePool's management courses, which cover leadership,
personal development, communication skills, budgeting, finance and
customer service.
Leonard Cheshire joined the first charity consortium with the
Prince's Trust, Scope, the Scout Association, VSO and WWF. It went
live with its first courses in January 2003 which are accessed via
the internet. Each charity has its own e-learning portal.
"From an IT point of view, we were 100% behind the idea from the
outset," said Brown. "The flexibility is fantastic. People can
learn from home if they want to.
"Although we are encouraging people to access the courses online,
many of our service branches only have one PC with internet access.
To resolve this, Jenison and KnowledgePool have also provided us
with the courses on CD-Rom.
"We have regional development officers who install the CD-Roms onto
PCs and co-ordinate the local aspects of the training. We have a
high number of online users and more than 20 of our services have
requested copies of the courses on CD-Rom.
"The IT training courses have proved popular with our
administrators. They do not normally receive training, so it has
been great to be able to provide this."
Human resources and IT representatives from the charities in the
consortium meet four times a year to share experiences and best
practice.
"If we can save people time by improving IT or business skills,
they will have more time to care for our users," said Brown.
"Also, by improving skills, we will become a more professional
organisation, which helps us attract donations."
Jenison is holding a seminar on e-learning for charities on 3 July.
For further information, contact Martin Baker at Jenison
07785-776416 or
e-mail
mbaker@jenison.co.uk