Welcome to Academy Box

We’re excited to go on a journey of eLearning excellence with you. 

Contact us

ABOUT US

We are a UK based company that provides e-learning consulting, hosting, content development and management services to both the corporate and SME market.

We can take your existing classroom based courses and transitioning them to e-learning. This can include recorded lectures, talking head tutorials, webcam insert tutorials, quizzes, questionnaires, written assignments, to name but a few activities.

We base our e-learning hosting solutions on the popular Moodle open-source (and free) LMS platform, as used by many leading universities, colleges, schools and corporates around the globe. By basing our solutions on Moodle, we are able to eliminate the expensive licensing fees associated with other vendor’s e-learning solutions, whilst still providing you with sufficient functionality to provide a rich e-learning experience.  You can learn more about LMS’s and Moodle on our FAQ section.

Hosting and maintaining an e-learning system (LMS) is technical stuff (and not very glamorous) but it is an important part of a total e-learning solution. Whilst you want to dazzle your learners with amazing courses and content, you need a solid, reliable, secure, user-friendly LMS to deliver the courses.

OUR SERVICES

We understanding e-learning and can assist you define and establish your own e-learning strategy, as well as getting you up and running with an e-learning platform (LMS) and great e-learning content.

If you already have your own internal IT department and server infrastructure, we will happily work hand-in-hand with your IT folk to establish your e-learning capability.

We are also pretty hot on gamification and can assist you use gamification to create employee engagement with your e-learning content.

We can create your e-learning content. We can also transition your existing classroom based courses to e-learning.

Content types that we can provide include:

– Instructional videos
– Recorded lectures / classes
– Talking head presentations
– Webcam insert presentations
– Text-to-speech presentations
– Written assignments
– Questionnaires
– Quizzes
– Interactive activities
– Gamification

We know Moodle really well and can assist you with the following:

– LMS installation at your site or ISP
– Web server configuration
– LMS configuration (security, corporate identify, repositories, backups, etc.)
– Plugin identification, installation and configuration
– Course Structure

While Moodle is pretty low maintenance, there are still some management tasks that need to be undertaken. With our server management service, we provide the following:

– Server monitoring (backups, disk & traffic volumes, log files, etc.)
– LMS software updates
– LMS plugin updates
– Server support and troubleshooting

Some of our customers prefer to do their own user administration while others outsource it to us. User administration includes:

– User account creation
– Enrollment of users on courses
– User account maintenance
– General user account support (password resets, etc.)

Some of our customers prefer to do their own user administration while others outsource it to us. User administration includes:

– User account creation
– Enrollment of users on courses
– User account maintenance
– General user account support (password resets, etc.)

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

A number of years ago, there was a real focus on professional, polished looking e-learning content.  This was during a time when authors were selling e-learning content online for a profit.

Today, the internet is flooded with good content about literally every topic and it is more and more difficult for authors to make money on content alone. Most authors now provided their content for free and charge for additional add-on value, such as a certificate of completion or some form of mentoring / couching.

Bearing the above in mind, you need to first question who is the intended audience of your e-learning content and what are their expectations.  If you are going to be selling your content for profit then you need to focus on the production quality.  If however, you will be giving your content away for free, or if it is intended for internal company consumption, then rather focus on getting your content together and published faster and sacrifice on the production quality.

Just bear in mind that we are becoming very comfortable with consuming videos and interviews (even on leading new channels) that is recorded on a simple webcam!

Any e-learning solution consists of two major components:

1) the course content, activities and assessments (created by a course designer), and
2) the server solution that securely hosts and delivers the course to the learners.

A Learning Management System (LMS) is the name for the software or web based technology that provides the second component of the solution.

The LMS allows the instructor to:

– create courses
– create course content and assessments
– deliver SCORM or xAPI content (see next question)
– create learners and enrol them in courses
– monitor learner progress
– assess learner performance.

More complex LMS’s (as often used in corporate environments) have additional functionality related to:

– the creation of learning plans
– scheduling and management of training events
– calculation and reporting of training costs
– definition of organisational hierarchies
– integration into other corporate systems (such as HR and performance management systems).

You do not need a LMS if you want to make your training content freely available on the internet with no need to record learner details and track their progress.  In this case you could just load your content up onto a web service such as YouTube and allow anyone to access it from there.

The moment that you have a need to control access to the courses and track learner progress, you need a LMS.

SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) is an international standard, originally developed by the US Department of Defence, for the creation and sharing of e-learning content.

In simple terms, think of SCORM as a common language that any SCORM compliant LMS understands.

If SCORM did not exist, your content developer would need to build your e-learning content in the specific language of your LMS. If you decided to move your e-learning solution to a different LMS, there would be a good chance that your new LMS would not understand your content and you would need to pay to have it re-written in the appropriate LMS language.

By starting your e-learning journey with a SCORM compliant LMS, your content developer can use whatever tool they want to develop your content without having to worry about the specific language of the LMS. Once they are ready to publish the content on the LMS they simply need to save it in SCORM format. Using SCORM also means that if you choose to move to a different LMS in future, your content will work seamlessly on the new LMS as long as it is also SCORM compliant.

Experience API (xAPI), also sometime called Tin Can, is a new common language which is gaining popularity. It does a similar thing to SCORM but supports a new concept that says that not all of a person’s learning takes place on the same LMS.  xAPI supports sharing the results of any assessments with other platforms to create a unified record of learning.

Most widely used content development tools can export content in either SCORM or xAPI.

Moodle is the world’s most popular LMS with over 68 million users and 55,000 sites world-wide.
Moodle is hugely popular as it is powerful, user-friendly, flexible and free!

Moodle is distributed under an open-source GNU General Public License which allows anyone to download and use it without paying any licenses fees.  Moodle and Moodle Partners make their money by providing additional services and support around the free-to-use Moodle platform.

Moodle provides the LMS functionality required for the majority of training need so be wary of a vendor who is trying to sell you on a different solution that costs an arm and a leg!

Check out additional information on Moodle by clicking here

If your organisation has good IT infrastructure and support then there is nothing stopping them downloading the Moodle code and installing it on one of their servers or at an Internet Service Provider.  Configuring and managing Moodle does, however, require expertise that most IT departments don’t natively have so they would have to undergo a steep learning curve.

In reality, most SME’s do not have the resources or desire to host their own LMS and choose to outsource this to a service provide such as Academy Box who specialise in LMS hosting and management.

RESOURCE CENTER

In this 20 minute video tutorial, our founder Gavin Thompson takes you through all you need to know about transitioning to e-learning.

Topics covered include:

– The 4 elements of a well designed course
– Tools for building e-learning
– A brief explanation of green screening (chromakey)
– What is a Learner Management Systems (LMS)
– The different publishing formats.

Click here to watch the video tutorial

OUR CLIENTS

Below are some of the great companies that we have assisted with their e-learning journey.

CONTACT US

Academy Box is a trading brand of:

Jebez Holdings LTD

Company Number: 12402137

Registered Address:
Winterhead Farm
Winscombe
North Somerset
BS25 1PP

Tel: +44 (0)753 575 1207