The principal advantage of the Philips Online Learning Center (OLC) is its ability to offer a wide audience personalized access to quality medical courseware via a familiar and ubiquitous medium – the Internet.
Taking a leadership role in online learning for the healthcare industry, the OLC has proven itself a welcome complement to traditional instructor-led education. With over 100,000 registered users and more than 250 tutorials, case studies and webcasts, this fast growing digital environment is being used in many different ways to satisfy the educational needs of busy medical professionals.
A broadening reach
Creative relationships spur growth. Organizations that cater to the medical community have sought to enhance their educational offerings by aligning themselves with the OLC. Content diversity, accreditation of content and ease-of-use are some of the reasons why.
“These partnerships are a win-win situation,” says Paula Sanderson, Director of Online Education for Philips Medical Systems. “We benefit by adding content to the OLC in areas where we don’t have the expertise. Our partners benefit by gaining access to an extensive library of programs and use of a proven delivery tool.” As a result of these partnerships, the subject matter of the OLC catalog is expanding dramatically. “We expect to add an additional 60 new courses to the Online Learning Center in 2007,” says Barbara Lebron, Online Course Developer for the OLC. “This will bring the offerings of the course catalog to over 300 courses in 2007.”
So, how do an association, a manufacturer, a technical college and a healthcare provider view the ‘best practice’ application of this new tool?
Hybrid learning techniques at ASRT
“What we’re looking to do is to tie multiple delivery methods together to create a very robust educational environment. We can tie an article from our scholarly journal to a program on the OLC which in turn can point back to a textbook for further study.”
- Greg Morrison, Executive VP and Chief Knowledge Officer
Stronger customer relationships at Bracco Diagnostics
“The analytic power behind an online educational service provides Bracco with the measurement tools necessary to proactively service, satisfy and retain key customers.”
- Pam Intile, Director of Customer Education
Digital studies at Northcentral Technical College
“Healthcare education is what we do. Online learning is how we do it. Together with Philips’ radiography and sonography courses, our ability to reach a broader audience is huge.”
- Marianne Rhodes, Relationship Manager
Career advancement opportunities at Kaiser Permanente
“Philips offers such a wide spectrum of specialty ultrasound CMEs that they fit perfectly within the specialties and subspecialties of our Kaiser system.”
- Michelle Wilson BS, RDCS, RDMS
Meeting industry standards
The Philips Online Learning Center is now ‘Sharable Content Object Reference Model’ or ‘SCORM’ compliant. This widely accepted distance-learning standard means any third party SCORM compatible learning module can easily be plugged into the OLC.
“It opens up new doors for us,” says Paula Sanderson. “In fact, we just contracted with Business Performance Technology, Inc. to publish four new management courses on the OLC and they dropped right in.” Now any author, who develops content using Microsoft PowerPointTM for example, need only use a plug-in tool such as Macromedia Breeze PresenterTM to make their content web-ready and SCORM compliant at the push of a button.
“SCORM module creation and deployment is becoming the normal modus operandi for most of our authors,” says Bob Carter, Executive Producer of the Online Learning Center. “Before SCORM content creation our authors had to develop their course using a structured authoring environment. While flexible and entirely Internet driven, this authoring tool did not allow the author to design course content using tools they were familiar with. Now they can use any third-party SCORM authoring program to create their course and then, using a simple upload feature, transfer their course to the LMS (Learning Management System) for content delivery, testing, and tracking. We have seen a sharp increase in the number of courses being offered because of this feature.”
Prepared for the future
The remarkable growth of the Online Learning Center has recently been marked by a significant milestone. “We just registered our 100,000th user in October 2006!” says Sanderson. “But more importantly, we’re looking to reach 150,000 to 175,000 by the end of 2007. This growth will be possible through new partner relationships and content expansion into underserved areas such as nursing which will be especially important for our patient monitoring business.”
The Philips Online Learning Center is a tangible example of a tool of the future – hard at work today.
[Published: 2006-11-14]