SkillSoft starts a dialogue

E.learning Age, Jun 2005

SkillSoft has released 'Dialogue', a virtual meeting-room environment allowing organisations to deliver business critical information to customers and employees.

The environment intersperses live online dialogue and audio with a variety of material including: word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, photography, PowerPoint presentations, music, commentary, and information from the internet or intranet. For just-in-time live training sessions, in-house modules, e-learningcourseware and online books and referenceware can also be incorporated.

Because of the web-based nature of the delivery, unlimited numbers of people can participate immediately and no downloads are necessary to make it work. Dialogue's features also allow instant interaction between those running the session and the participants.

Kevin Young, managing director of SkillSoft, said:"Dialogue represents the next generation of virtual classroom technology and is a valuable addition to any organisation's blended learning portfolio. But rather than being restricted to training delivery alone, it can be used to quickly engage with employees, stakeholders and/or customers for any purpose."

Neil Grant, head of global learning and talent management at Marconi, is one of the first to trial the new technology. He said: "We have found it extremely straightforward to build Dialogue sessions and can see lots of potential for using this means of delivering training across Marconi. Our technical training departments are particularly interested in its use for educating customers and employees with product knowledge. We see the main benefits of Dialogue to be the range of content type that can be included, the dynamic interaction between delegates and tutor, and the ease of remote training delivery. These benefits make Dialogue a very powerful addition to the training delivery methods available to us."