eLearning

Yesterday we heard another example of "what to do after studies".
This time, Shane Cronin from the DEIS department. For all non-irish: DEIS is the irish word for "oportunity". The DEIS department does research in the area of elearning and is founded by the 7th European Union Framework Programme. At the moment it is staffed by 4 persons. 
After a short introduction of his career Shane told us about his daily work. Shane studied Mutlimedia App Development (dipl.), then made his Bachelor of Arts Honor at the CIT in Multimedia. After 2 years working experience as freelancer for Food's kool at the West Cork Leader and Safe Food Ireland he came back to the CIT to work as app developer for the elearning department.

The elearning department works for both, commercial project and European research projects.
As we already heard a lot about research projects Shane focused his presentation more at the commercial projects and showed us examples, how such projects work.
The projects usually have 6 steps:

1. Brief from client
2. Quotation
3. Contract
4. Project work begins
5. Client Review
6. Sign Off

Elearning is not just distance learning for further education. It can also mean to explain a product to customers. Those explanation videos are often seen on homepages where start-ups explain there services (e.g. dropbox, prezi)
Shane gave us an example of the AIB Merchant Services system, which AIB offers in cooperation with zapatag. Zapatag is a bonus point system (an RFID chip on the customer's mobile), which brings customers discounts and the store owners detailed data about their customers and their shopping habbits. But why should I explain it when the DEIS department created a video. But before watching it, Shane explained us the steps before, showed us the storyboard, the voice over, so it was quite interesting to see the finished product, which is now embedded at the AIBms.com homepage. But also in my blog:



Another example which was more elearning in the classical sense was the production of elearning videos for the staff of the postbank, to teach them in new products.
The videos are mainly made in flash, in case of the postbank example there was also real video, shooted in a studio in a bluescreen.
But the production of the videos/animation is the last step. Im comparision to normal video production much more effort is neseccary to put in the concept, that the viewers really understand and learn, what the video wants to teach.

University kills free economy?
After those examples we had a lively discussion, lead by the freelancers of our masters course, if the trend, that the CITs do commercial project weaks the small companies and freelancers. CITs get their equipement by the government to do research. When doing commercial projects, the can perform much cheaper and efficient then a normal company, which is a damage for the normal economy, especially small media companies.

Again I enjoyed the input, because I never thought about working in such an area.