This week marks another amazing milestone for Discover eLearning as we celebrate the fourth anniversary of our official launch in 2016!
When Discover eLearning launched four years ago, I was starting a whole new phase in my career and discovering what life would be like working as a digital development contractor.
Of course, working for yourself has its high and low points, as any freelancer will attest to! One of the biggest challenges I have found over the years is always finding the time for creativity and discovery, without becoming overstretched with the day-to-day duties of running a business.
To that end, I have always viewed Discover eLearning as not just a trading name for the work that I do, but as a brand that I have worked tirelessly from the very start to build and have recognised in the North East and beyond for delivering high quality digital learning experiences.
I’ve always aimed to offer a personable service that means our clients will continue to work with us long after the initial pitch.
Something that I have been most proud of during my time as a company director has been how much of our work has taken place in our region. Supporting Middlesbrough College to build and launch their very first fully online Access To Higher Education Diploma in Health course is one of my greatest achievements to date.
This particular project led onto both the college and Discover eLearning being nominated for not just one, but two awards at the 2019 Learning Technology Awards. The gala evening in London was a wonderful event as it gave me the opportunity to network with many creative individuals working in some of the biggest companies in the learning technology sector today.
To then see our name lit up on screen along with some of these much larger and highly equipped studios across the country was very humbling. You can read my write up of the event here – Discover eLearning named runners-up at Learning Technologies Awards.
Since launch, a key focus of Discover eLearning has been to support the adoption of WordPress based Learning Management Systems for business and for independent training providers, seeking the most efficient and value-added route to market for what is typically their first steps to implementing digitally enhanced learning.
Discover eLearning continues to work with organisations both at home and overseas to demonstrate the benefits of WordPress for education, something that we believe with the right approach and digital learning strategy can deliver an outstanding learner/customer experience at exceptional value.
We champion LearnDash LMS, and are proud to be continuously referred to as a recommended UK based developer by the LearnDash team themselves. As well as this, our own add-on plugins for LearnDash LMS have to-date exceeded over 2000 downloads!
I have made it a continuing mission to improve our offering for online learning experience builders who use LearnDash LMS, with our most recent plugin – Talk To The Learner For LearnDash – providing the ability for course developers to bring learner data out of LearnDash LMS to place directly into Articulate Storyline generated eLearning content.
The plan will be to continue our investment in tools and ideas that LearnDash users will find useful, so be on the lookout for even more WordPress plugins coming from Discover eLearning later this year!
Of course the latter quarter of this year brought about its own unique challenges (of which we are all too familiar by now!), but this also brought with it many opportunities, as more businesses and educators tap into the value of blending digital learning delivery into their strategy for the short-medium term.
As a result, we have already made some wonderful new connections with established institutions in our region. These include Silverlink Software, who are a leading supplier of patient administration software to the NHS, and Teesside University with whom we will be launching a series of digital learning ‘eResources’ for the benefit of healthcare sector workers later in the year.
On a personal note, I also wanted to include how much I have enjoyed being a part of the creative development on the Alice In Typhoidland exhibition project at The University of Oxford over the past year. This live exhibition, utilising a mix of digital and interactive media, provided a wonderful opportunity to physically see an audience engage with the work that was produced, which is something that in eLearning we very rarely get to see.
I look forward to sharing more stories from our news desk throughout the rest of 2020. In the meantime I hope that you will connect with us either through our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn pages where we share daily the latest news, insight and helpful resources coming from either us or the wider eLearning industry.
Also, if you are perhaps in search of a digital development partner to help get your next project off the ground then please do consider us, we’d love to hear from you.
Finally, if we’ve had the pleasure of working alongside or collaborating with you, then we’d like to say a big thank you for letting us do the work that we love! Here’s to the next four years.
Chris
