Informal learning - a day of distinctions part 2

... continuing my rundown of the eLearning Network's excellent day on Informal Learning.

Jean in het Panhuis is from ING Wholesale Banking Academy.  He is an enthusiastic user of Microsoft’s SharePoint Server, which he believes will replace the traditional intranet portals in his company. He believes it allows the Academy to support informal learning by making it easy to publish to closed groups as well as to the ‘public’ intranet. They provide tools and services to enable business users to create eLearning. These include Articulate, which they use to add value to existing Powerpoint presentations, RapidL which allows eLearning to be maintained by updating Word documents, and game-based learning templates they’ve developed themselves (after starting with Who Wants To Be a Millionaire and finding the renewal costs prohibitive.)  These games are quite simple in concept – e.g. athletes progress along a track by answering questions about compliance – but they’ve found that their use, particularly in multi-player competitive mode, means learners undertake more repetition than they would normally volunteer to do, and consquently show higher retention in test scores. http://elearninggames.eu.   The bank has also taken to wikis – INGWiki has over 2000 articles, with around 1000 users (5% of staff so far).