The National Laboratory for Education Transformation (NLET) and SkillsCommons have joined forces to bring a new level of development, services and community to SkillsCommons in services of a mission to have a vital community utilizing open occupational and training resources, courses and programs on an on-going basis.
Makeovers for Occupational Portals
SkillsCommons has built a variety of portals that make it easy for communities to find, download, and use workforce training materials for FREE.
NLET will work with community college systems, state labor organizations and corporations to harness the resources in SkillsCommons and make them custom-available for your organization by “making over” (rebranding or white-labeling) a version of a SkillsCommons portal.
NLET will enable open and proprietary institutions, systems or employers to use the repository services by SkillsCommons but in branded site to your institution, system or agency. This includes the development and management of other collections or even non-open courses and programs that take advantage of the SkillsCommons infrastructure. Through integration services, a branded portal can connect into other services on campus, with workforce boards, or incorporate other labor data sets.
Course, Program & Content Management & Marketing
Marketing occupational courses and programs whether for-fee courses and programs or open, credit or noncredit, is difficult. The problem is made worse by the limitations of on-campus LMS and SIS systems where contracts or licenses may limit operating easily on the Web or in apps. Similarly, campuses do not do a good job connecting students to how their learning and training options connect to the labor markets and regional jobs. NLET works with partner www.PragyaSystems.com to design content, advising and career exploring for community college, universities and employers.
Non-LMS Course & Content Management
Managing occupational and training content in a competency framework is hard to in a standard LMS. When modules are created that include texts, video, games and audio, where to store those, how to tag them and how to re-use them becomes a problem in a standard LMS. Similarly, students, employees or jobseekers are taking credit or non-credit courses from more than one provider, issues with logins and multiple identities are a problem.
NLET and SkillsCommons can help manage learning and training content so it can be free of being stored in a proprietary Leaning Management System (LMS). This includes tagging the content for inclusion in SkillsCommons and storing it for re-use by others or the owner’s re-use.
Marketing Workforce, Occupational & Training Course/Programs
Marketing has always been the Achilles heel community college workforce and occupational programs, both for-credit and non-credit offerings. An NLET partner has begun a unique marketplace portal for noncredit courses and programs. This partner will be announced shortly.
Every year the www.CloseIt.org conference brings together organization across the spectrum of community colleges, workforce boards, social tech developers, government agencies and employers to enter into dialogues about how noncredit and occupation learning and working can be made more efficient. Consider attending in 2020
CONTACT NLET TEAM:
For more information please view the Summary of NLET-SkillCommons Services.
- Gordon Freedman gordon.freedman@nlet.org
- Susie Freedman susie.freedman@nlet.org
- Kathleen Ives kathleen.ives@nlet.org