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UK public sector gains CloudStore learning
The UK government has entered into an
agreement which allows more than 2,500 courses and 117,000 training videos to be
available to the public sector. The deal, made by the Crown Commercial
Service (CCS), is with
Lynda.com, an online learning company which is providing the material to be published on The CloudStore. The CloudStore is part of the G-Cloud Framework Agreement which is designed to allow the government to centrally manage the procurement of goods and services. The
Lynda.com library is currently accessible to individuals through corporate and academic subscriptions, but the agreement now allows access public sector access through a government subscription. Alex Zivoder, vice president and managing director of
Lynda.com, said: “Using the CloudStore, the UK’s wider public sector can now buy
Lynda.com in a simple and cost- effective way.”
Lynda.com provides subscribers with three packages involving short tutorials or comprehensive courses, covering topics such as business skills and leadership.
Reseller partnership agreement for Asia
An Asian-based learning technology provider and eXact Learning Solutions have signed a partnership agreement. Under the agreement Kydon Learning Systems Institute is to act as the reseller for eXact’s Learning Solution content management system (LCMS) in Singapore and Malaysia. This deal comes after Kydon’s aim in the last year to become a ‘super user’ of the LCMS. Chief executive and chief learning architect
of Kydon, David Yeo, said: “We were looking for a platform to help us manage and author learning contents, especially at an enterprise level.” The reason for the partnership was the
template-based structure used by eXact, and their ability to demonstrate how Kydon would build its own templates. The partnership has allowed users to create and publish content, store it in a centralised location and revise and re-use existing content in existing formats.
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Rayson steps down from C&G Kineo
Steve Rayson resigned as managing director of City & Guilds Kineo at the end of August. He made the decision after nine years as managing director of Kineo. In a statement, Rayson said: “I have made the difficult decision to move on and explore new opportunities.” The new managing director is Matthew Johnson.
Kineo was founded in 2005 and the company has grown profitably every year and from a start-up the company is now a £20m global company with offices from Chicago to Melbourne. Rayson said: “It has been an exciting adventure, hard work but fun. We sold the business to City & Guilds back in 2012 and have continued to grow as City & Guilds Kineo. Now feels like the right time for me to hand over the baton to someone new to take the business forward.”
Rayson plans to continue to be involved in the Rayson: right time to hand baton over
e-learning community as “I passionately believe in the potential of learning and technology to improve performance. I very much hope to be able to continue to contribute to future thinking in this area.” He plans to invest and work with start-up companies and work part-time with City & Guilds to explore how the group can invest in and support learning technology start-ups.
His first personal
investment is a start-up venture called Buzzsumo, with Kineo co-director Stephen Walsh. Buzzsumo is a free social search engine designed to find the most shared content and key influencers for any topic or domain. n Rayson has been instrumental in the City & Guilds/e.learning age report and the next one in the series is out this autumn
LTG remains confident
Learning Technologies Group saw revenues increase by 8% in the six months to June 2014 compared with the same period in 2013. The groups said the acquisitions of LINE Communications and learning games company Preloaded in April and May had limited contribution to the period. The company described the result as a ‘good performance’ and said that it had seen a hiatus in its Brazilian business due to the World Cup. Some of the trading improvement was due to the rapidly growing New York office and LTG described itself as ‘encouraged’ by the customer reaction to the release in April of Gomo 2.0, its multi-device authoring tool.
Commenting on the integration of the
acquisition, LTG said that there had been little or no disruption and all key members of staff had been
retained. It added that the deals confirmed its view that a buy and build strategy, alongside strong international organic growth is “both attractive and achievable and that the creation of a global leader in the e-learning space, with revenues in excess of £50m remains our goal.” It added that further “interesting acquisition opportunities were being carefully considered.” It said that the salesforce of LEO (the rebranded Epic and LINE businesses) was involved in a significant number of negotiations with large international corporations to provide significant and strategic learning solutions complemented where appropriate by learning ‘games with purpose’ and that the second half of 2014 was being viewed with confidence.
Interim results are expected in September. e.learning age september 2014
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