Janison Blogs

Janison Releases Mandatory Training Module

Janison are excited to have released new Mandatory Training functionality.  In response to customer requirements from a range of industry sectors, Janison have streamlined and enhanced support for the management and delivery of Mandatory Training.  Key features include:

• Easy and rapid configuration
• Powerful requisite management, across face to face training, online training and competencies
• Assign requisites at any level or profile in your organisation
• User friendly and highly visual compliance indicators for end-users
• Comprehensive reporting


Among other clients, Ramsay Health Care, are progressing with the roll-out of the mandatory training capability to streamline the management of compliance across their ~160 hospitals in Australia and UK.  Benefits Ramsay hope to obtain include:

• Reduced admin time for reporting
• Improved compliance
• Improved consistency of requisite assignment

The above benefits combined mean that both Janison and Ramsay are looking forward to using the new capability across their ~40,000 users.

If you’re interested in reading more about this, here are some of our thoughts on Mandatory Training in an Enterprise Environment. 

Traineeships at Janison

As an innovative software company, Janison  also encourages local youth traineeships.  One of the most recent recruits into the traineeship program is Sean Forkin.  Sean was employed under the  Australian Apprenticeships which encompass all apprenticeships and traineeships. This traineeship combines training and employment which will lead to a nationally recognised qualification for Sean.

 Sean commenced his traineeship in Information technology (support) at the beginning of 2010.  Completion of his traineeship will result in a Certificate 1V qualification.  The course is delivered as a flexible work based mode and course material is delivered online.  To attain the qualification Sean is required to  complete 22 units as well as the foundation units.

 In the past 2 years Sean has developed the required knowledge and skills to provide technical, client & product support to our customers. He has  learnt how to define & diagnose user needs and to rectify problems relating to the Janison products.

When Sean has completed this course he will be eligible for advanced standing in several other Information Technology courses. 

Further information on traineeships and the course Sean is undertaking can be found at the below websites.

https://www.tafensw.edu.au/courses/types/apptrain.htm

https://www.tafensw.edu.au/howex/servlet/Course?Command=GetCourse&CourseNo=19005

 

 

New Play By The Rules course available

The latest course to be released on the Australian Sports Commission Learning Portal features a number of new components of technology recently developed by the Janison team.

Play By The Rules is a course designed for coaches, administrators, officials and players and covers Child Protection, Harassment and Discrimination.

Here's a short preview of some the course components.

The producer of this course, Greg McLoughlin-Wilden, commented that the new course design technologies had provided some significant benefits throughout the development phase of the project.

'The inline content editing tools proved to be easy and quick to use, and instructionally they support students to reflect on previous situations and their comments.'       

The intuitive design approach also provided additional benefits. 

'The course used to be made up of 4 courses and about 12 modules.  Most of them just duplicated each other with some subtle differences.  The platform allowed us to reduce that count to two, and when profile specific pages becomes available it means we won't have to provide State or Sport specific Courses based on the generic course, we'll just edit or add a page just for that profile. This allowed great economies.'

Greg also used photo essays to keep control of production costs but maintain production quality, here's an example of one of the photo essays embedded in the course.

 

Congratulations Greg and Canopi eLearning Design on this new course release, we are looking forward to working with you again on new course designs.

 

 

Janison at Microsoft Education Partner Advisory Forum

 On Monday, I had the privilege of attending the Microsoft Education Partner Advisory Forum. Held in Seattle each year, there were around 18 attendees from UK, Australia, US, France, Brazil, Canada and New Zealand. The forum is an invite only event, and as such, there is a great collection of innovative Education companies, many of whom compete in slightly different spaces. Some sell Office, Exchange and Lync to Education, others have Student Management Systems, or develop Office Plug-ins for children. Some, like Janison are in the Learning Management System space (though no-one else was in large scale Online Assessment like us). Janison was the biggest user of Azure represented.

The purpose of the session was for Microsoft to present some free and frank information to us for discussion and feedback. We covered topics including Azure, Office 365, Compete with Google and VMWare vs. HyperV. These sessions make you appreciate just how big and sophisticated this company is, and the real-world and familiar challenges they go through. It’s just at a larger scale. Every year, they review their priorities for the coming year using a very self-critical process which then informs their budget and annual plan. Issues that end up at the top of Steve Ballmer’s agenda can literally result in a large team of engineers being assigned to address them. It’s clear that like any company, Microsoft has dreams, hopes and fears.

It became clear that our work with ESSA is a massive success story where Azure not only helped with the technical feasibility but was also more cost effective than conventional methods of achieving the same result.

Office 365 – the cloud version of Office that includes Sharepoint, Lync and Exchange is a fundamental part of their longer term strategy. Microsoft strength lies in their platform and ecosystem of applications, and the way each of their systems integrate and work together. In future, I’m sure we’re going to see a clearer vision from them about how Skype fits into that picture, and it was also clear that it’s going to be up to Microsoft’s partners to use their platform to deliver value-added solutions to clients.

I found that Microsoft takes competing with Google Docs more seriously than I would expect. Recently due to the GFC and funding challenges in education (the school year is one week shorter in Seattle this year, and in Spain, some schools finish an hour earlier to reduce air-conditioning costs!), a number of education organisations have chosen Google Docs. Despite financial pressures, I don’t understand why some of these organisations move to Google because Microsoft Office is still light years ahead terms of the interoperability and productivity it enables. I would be happy for my children to use any search tool at school, but would want them to learn Excel and WORD as these are the real-world applications that have relevance in businesses. I don’t see Google achieving that any time soon. However, clearly, Google’s financial success, lack of expectations and legacy ‘constraints’, speed of innovation and fundamentally different business model are sufficient cause to keep Microsoft on their toes in a space that they have dominated successfully for a long time.

The next few days we will be in the main part of the Global Education Partner Summit. There are 40+ countries represented (a staggering 10% of people are from the Netherlands), and I’m looking forward to meeting some people – already I’ve had conversations with people from Spain, US, UK, Dubai, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, Netherlands and Australia. In the last few days, we’ve also experienced more than 5% of Seattle’s annual good weather quota, and it’s been a fantastic city to visit.

What to expect in 2012

Now 2011 has come to a close there's lot to expect from Janison in 2012.

In the last few months of 2011 we put in place new infrastructure and services to help prepare for a very busy 2012 !

One of the most important additions was the launch of our new offices which now have support for up to 70 staff on site, 5 discrete meeting areas each with their own video conferencing facilities, new staff amenities and new communications equipment. It's been a steady progression of improvement for our office over many years, but this now represents an important coming of age for Janison and its place in our local business community. To help celebrate our opening, we were pleased to have Stephen Conroy, Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy join us with over 100 local guests to recognise the opening of our office and the launch of the Switched On Coffs Digital Strategy. We have put together a few highlights of the opening in a video below.

Whilst our local offices were receiving attention, so too was our Sydney web farm. We replaced all our exisiting servers with the latest hardware and software from DELL and Microsoft to deliver a completely new web server environment with more sophisticated failover capability and five times the processing, storage and backup capacity of the orginal equipment. All customers are now hosted on our new infrastructure and are reporting improved response times and better service performance.

So with 2012 now upon us, what's next.

• A new course player technology has been developed and utilised in one recently released course -  Play by the Rules for the Australian Sports Commision, you'll see more clients accessing this technology soon.
• A new test design system is being developed for our CAFE Assessment product which will revolutionise the way teams build and design assessments.
• The latest update to the Deloitte Leadership Academy will soon be released with many new features and functions.
• The next iteration of ESSA Online Assessment system will include HTML5 interaction support.
• A new Mandatory Training management system has been included into our LMS to allow the support of detailed control and management of mandatory training processes within organisations.

And there's lot more to come ! We look forward to keeping you up to date through out 2012.

 

 

ESSA Year 8 Science - 2011

Congratulations to the team that brought ESSA Year 8 Science succesfully to over 65,000 students this year.

After last year's success we knew it could be done, but there certainly were many more new challenges this year. Effectively we increased the number of questions from 12 to 100 and we doubled the numbers of students online at one time.

Here's a little look at how students viewed the test.

The entire online test environment was hosted at its own web site - this was a Windows Azure cloud site which had more 300 servers running during the event to service the students actions. 

After logging on, students were presented with a number of introductory pages which then lead to a dashboard containing the 14 sections that each had from 6 to 9 questions.

Clicking an image tile revealed the questions for that section and students could easily answer and navigate between the questions in the section.

 

Also this year we recorded quite a lot of new infomation abut how students attempt the test and the types of environments they used to complete the test. As this was the first time such a large number of students were online at one time it was a great opportunity to examine how the state infrastructure supported such events.

 For example one metric we recorded was the speed each student was able to connect to the system.

It was great to see that over 88% of students were connecting to te web sites at speeds faster than 1MBit per second and where students conected at less than 1MBit per second the average speeds was still acceptable.

If you would like to check out more of the metrics visit our metric site which shows some very detailed information about the event itself.

http://cafemetrics.cloudapp.net/essalive/review

 

We're Moving!

Well actually we aren't technically moving out, just downstairs as well, taking over the whole building.

Those of you who have been to Coffs Harbour know that we are perfectly positioned, snuggled in the midst of cafes and restaurants, a stone's throw from the beach and more cafes ( see the trend here?). So when the opportunity came to expand in our current location, it was an obvious step.

Our new office will give us the room we need to increase our staff and create a more vibrant environment for them and for you too if you come and visit us. We will post some pictures of the new improved Janison offices when the move and renovations are completed.

Janison in the Community - AIME

Janison staff are involved with the local community in a number of ways. Recently Shelley and Sue put their hands up to mentor local indigenous students as part of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience ( AIME http://www.aimementoring.com ). This is their story.

Sue and I attend the local University once a week on Tuesday afternoons to meet with local indigenous kids in years 9 and 10.

We have both been matched up with two girls from different schools.  We work with these kids to try and build their self-esteem and the main goal of the program is to have more indigenous kids finish high school and attend university.  The kids come from different high schools in the region such as Woolgoolga High, Orara, Jetty, JPC and Toormina.

Each week we have different topics that we go through to get the mentees (kids) to really think about who they are and what they want to become.

The response we get from the kids varies from week to week , but we both remember what it was like to be a 15 year old girl -  we didn’t have the struggles that some of these kids have and it was a hard time for us , so they are doing well.

Another part of the AIME program is study groups that are held at the schools after school hours so that the kids can go there do their homework, get assistance doing school work and socially interact with other kids.  These go for one and half hours and often half hour is spent playing a game to build confidence.

These kids have had a different way of life to what we knew and took for granted and we are happy if we can try and help them realise that they can do and achieve whatever they want to.

 

Telstra Australian Regional Business of the Year 2011

Each award Janison has won this year is special and different in its own way.

 Janison was proud to be awarded the title of Telstra Best Australian Regional Business last month in Melbourne. We were one of only 6 National winners from over 6000 businesses around Australia that entered the awards this year.  The award confirms that it is possible to build a great business where ever you may be, if you have the right elements. Being based in a region doesn’t mean you are isolated in any way, in fact both our staff and clients are pleased that we have chosen Coffs Harbour to create Janison.

 

 As part of the process, we were lucky to meet a wide range of exemplary businesses from around Australia, and felt very humble to be surrounded by so many interesting stories. If you go to the awards website you can meet some of them and see what they have to offer. http://www.telstrabusinessawards.com/ 

One of the highlights of the Telstra awards was having the opportunity to listen to John Anderson who started Contiki tours. His inspiring talk had us all wiping away the tears and we were most grateful for his generous gesture of a signed book for every one of the companies shortlisted at the national level. We are looking forward to reading his book ‘Only 2 Seats Left’ , if it’s anything like the man himself it should be excellent.

 John talked about Contiki and the things that made it successful and it was heartening to sit there and mentally tick them off in our heads as he spoke. It seems like the recipe for success is universal, passion, vision, commitment and presenting your team with challenges.

Each award presents challenges and our challenge is to continue, with the support of our great team and clients, to build our business from our base in Coffs Harbour.

iAwards 2011 Award

It's a busy time at the moment.

With the new financial year starting, there are a number of new projects and opportunities developing and I'm feeling very excited about the potential of some of our new technologies to really enable our clients to great things with learning and assessment.

We have always had innovative ideas and from those ideas, built innovative systems. But this year we decided we would spread the word a little further than just the clients we work with, and enter some of the work we've done just over the last twelve months for some awards.

One award we havent spoken about much is the iAwards. These are a set of awards specifically for organisations that work in the information and communications technology industries and are open to any organisation working in Australia.

 

Earlier in July, our new cloud based assessment system won the NSW iAward for the best elearning application and last week CAFE won the national award too. It was a great thrill and a really wonderful milestone for us. Having had our business and our ability to partner recognised also this year, being recognised by your industry peers just adds further to a sense of accomplishment.

We're very proud of the assessment system, CAFE. It's really quite unique. Its been a great team effort to build and deliver the product and yesterday, Aaron and I travelled to Melbourne to meet and present to the judging panel for the national iAwards and it was a great opportunity for us to reflect on what we had achieved to date.

Earlier this year I recorded an interview with ZDNet that explained a little more about the system and its related technologies.

I'd like to acknowledge all the other state winners in this category this year too. We had some fantastic competition, including the CSIRO which won a merit award, Curtin University and the Australia Centre for the Moving Image.

It's great to see so many organisations making innovative contributions to the e-learning industry and being recognised for all the hard work that goes in to delivering such projects.

For us, we now prepare for the Asia-Pacific ICT Awards which will be held in Bangkok later this year.