With unemployment still at record levels, education is under the radar as the answer to increasing competitiveness and aid economic recovery.
Irish company, ALISON, a free online learning website, has seen its numbers of registered learners worldwide reach 500,000. 40,000 of these are Irish people. This was announced today (Thursday 29th July 2010). Providing over 150 high quality interactive multimedia certified courses in a diverse range of subjects, the number of ALISON learners is set to grow exponentially over the next year, as more people are looking to up skill themselves in order to avail of opportunities that arise.
ALISON offers individuals and organizations the opportunity to secure and expand workplace employment opportunities and can on a national level, help the UK on its way to economic recovery.
ALISON provides interactive multimedia courses for subjects as diverse as IT Literacy, English Language, Financial Literacy, Math, Business Skills and Health & Safety for Schools. It serves both the adult and second level learners. Since the beginning of 2007, ALISON has acquired learners in every country worldwide. It's mission is to enable anyone, anywhere to educate themselves for free via the Internet.
An example of an ALISON course is ABC IT, which is the most popular IT skills certification. It includes comprehensive training on the Internet, key desktop applications like Word and Excel as well as the full range of practical IT skills, including touch-typing and the efficient use of Web-based e-mail. It is also prefaced by a beginner's guide to a personal computer, and so is ideal for learners who have no IT experience. For Certification, ALISON uses a highly innovative approach of Flash-Testing, where anyone, anywhere, can be challenged to take a five minute test to validate their certification attainment via ALISON. In this way, both training and testing are provided free of charge. ALISON is a social enterprise and sustains itself on advertising, premium charges and content development fees.
Speaking about the establishment of ALISON CEO Mike Feerick said "My mission at ALISON has been to find a way to get quality interactive learning material to anyone who needs it worldwide for free - in a sustainable and scalable manner. Universal education is in my view, the only way we can sort many of the problems facing us, not just poverty but climate change and population control" This fits in with ALISON's driving philosophy; Article 26 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights which stats that. "Everyone has the right to education" and "Education shall be free....."
Mr. Feerick went on to say "Education providers and policy makers need to take note, ALISON is not just about providing a massive savings opportunities in these times of budget cutbacks. The ALISON offers the promise of a new heretofore untold horizon of education access and potential learning achievement that will change our world; a world, which opens up the highest levels of educational achievement to all, and separates it from no one."
ALISON stands for Advance Learning Interactive Systems Online. For the full list of new courses, go to the website http://alison.com/course/
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