Arizona students may not immediately have the chance to take advantage of eLearning development due to a decision by governor Jan Brewer, but there’s hope that state legislators may take future action to make this software available to all students.
Despite her actions, Brewer acknowledged that she supported eLearning development and felt it would become more common as time passed. However, she also claimed the proposed mobile learning initiatives in the legislation she turned down didn’t feel like a good fit for her state. The proposed program would have allowed students from middle school and up to take standardized final exams in a computerized setting under the watch of a staff member to reduce cheating, as well as facilitating the creation of a master list of statewide mobile learning opportunities and standardized evaluations. She’s hopeful that through custom software development Arizona students will be able to use eLearning opportunities in the future.
“ADE (the Arizona Department of Education) may not be able to implement the systems properly, at least as the bill is drafted,” Brewer went on to state.
Aware of audience
Custom training software is a vital piece of new educational movements for any school or business but as Arizona’s legislative failure demonstrates, it’s essential that training software fits the institution it was built to serve. The governor said that the bill before her would have provided the state to choose online curricula for its schools, a move that may not have worked for every educational system in the state, as some may have different courses of study or implementation needs.
In fact, if a custom software solution doesn’t work for a business, employees may not finish courses or even begin them. In some cases, points out MindIQ CEO Louis Bernstein, the company may never even implement the software.
“It is easy to show someone all the research data about how successful companies are, the companies that invest in their employees’ education,” Bernstein wrote in an article for The Training and Development World. “Most organizations just have a need to transfer knowledge to the employees on information critical to their company and job function [but] the students will tell you the courses were not good or not stimulating enough so they lost interest.”
Creative solutions
Bernstein’s concerns may reach all the way to Arizona, where teaching custom training software won’t be available to middle- and high-school students until the right solution is reached. If Arizona legislators can tweak future bills and find software solutions that are flexible enough to fit public and charter institutions, students may yet reap the benefits, while schools could see funding for supporting these initiatives.
Contact Stacey Burris at sburris@csesoftware.com or 1.309.670.7595 and ask for a eLearning demo today!
