Learndirect - of 'course'! (learndirect.co.uk)

Member Name: linzib

Product:	learndirect.co.uk
Date:	05/07/02 (638 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Flexible, Massive range and diverstity of courses, Good support

Disadvantages: Bad search facility, Some dated courses

Learndirect are run by the UK government's company UFI (University for Industry), and has several main arms, as outlined below.

If you visit the Learndirect site you are greeted by options from which to choose:

1) Learndirect

2) Learndirect, National Learning Advice

3) Learndirect Business, and finally

4) Learndirect Corporate

Most users like you or I would only ever make use of the first two options, which I will go into detail on in a moment. Before I do, I will give brief details on the latter two. But this opinion is mainly centred on the Leardirect courses and how they are offered.

Learndirect 'Business' and 'Corporate' are, as the titles suggest aimed at businesses and corporations based in the UK. Corporate is targetted at larger businesses where courses are for the high levels of staffing and the training requirements that would go hand in hand with operations of that size.

The 'business' section is very similar to the online courses offered in the first option (plain old 'Learndirect' - see below), but enables small to medium sized enterprises to sign up themselves or employees on courses directly without having to go via centre.

In the common with the flow of this opinion(working backwards through my list) I now come on to the Learndirect National Learning Advice. This is the part of Learndirect you are likely to have seen before with their massive TV and newspaper advertising campaign. Most memorable (or could be recent one) is the chap dress up as a spanner on a bus muttering "0800 100 900" over and over, looking for a telephone, and then eventually he spots one, falls off the bus, and calls the number looking for advice on a change of career.

This is mostly true about the Learndirect National Learning Advice service, as via the website or phone line you can contact them about advice on any course running in the U
K. It is kind of like the careers advice you got when you got near the end of your school days, but a bit more of asking what you want to be able to do, rather than telling you!

The main part of Learndirect that I have experience of (and that I assume is their main thing) is their own courses (the first part on the list of 4). The search facility on the site to look through their list of courses is not the best in the world by a long shot, but there are over 600 courses to choose from, but you really do feel that as such a key element of the site it really could have been better.

With courses ranging from basic introduction to word processing or Windows to Expert spreadsheets or databases and web-design using XML. But not all the courses are I.T. based - check out some of these for diversity:

Environmental Management Solutions Toolkit

Fork Lift Truck Operation in a Warehouse Environment - The Theory

Helping deaf and hard of hearing customers

7 Tools: Tally Charts, Bar Charts and Histograms

Leadership Skills

And that was just a few I spotted in a couple of minutes looking around the site (using the lists and not the search!!)

My recommendation would be, have a look around the list of courses and if you want to enroll avoid the ones marked (NETg) - they are complicated and hard to follow, but if you look around you will see there are many courses marked (EP) - these are far better and have just a wide range of courses. There is more than just online courses, there are also books and CD-ROM based courses too!

The biggest advantage (and perhaps drawback) to Learndirect is that you study at a time, place and pace that suits you. Great if you need flexibility and are good at managing your own time, not so great if you have a habit of putting things off!!! But if set yourself a certain target amount of studying each week or month and stick to it you will do fine, and it doesn'
;t matter going at the pace of the slowest person in the class - because you are the only person in the class!!!

If you can, don't enroll via the site, but call into one of the Learndirect centres or access points, where they can talk to you and provide help and support. Just because you enroll in a centre or access point doesn't mean you have to go there every time to study, you can still work from home, the library or any other place with internet access.

To study an online course from home you will need a fairly recent PC (almost anything 5 or 6 years old and newer is OK), internet connection and also various browser plug-ins like Macromedia Flash, Authorware etc... but these are free, so just a few minutes downloading them is all you need to do.

If you want to study from home, without going into a centre, find the course you want, and then when you "find a Learndirect centre" tick the box for "virtual learning centre". There are a lot of these centres that will do the course for you for free, but as with all centres they can charge up to £10 per course admin fee, and the Virtual Centres frequently do.

Whichever way you learn, via a centre or a virtual centre, you have support from them in the form of a contact email address or in person if you are in the centre itself. There is also a 0800 freephone number that is available 24/7 for help and support on the courses, so you really are not dumped in front of a screen and told to get on with it, FAR FROM IT!

One very important thing to note about the Learndirect courses is that whilst they do NOT award you with a qualification at the end, you can use what you study to count towards a qualification elsewhere. But you do get the knowledge that you want, which is very important!

Summary: