E-Learning Awards Citations 2011

Judges' Citations

The E-Learning Awards continue to be a fantastic showcase for the astonishing range and depth of e-learning. Now in their seventh year, the 2011 Awards have broken records in terms of entry numbers and have demonstrated the strength and depth of successful e-learning that is taking place across the globe. Despite the tough and uncertain conditions that persist for all sectors of the economy the fact remains that e-learning continues to flourish.

The number of Awards entries increased again with a rich mix of new entrants and some well established names returning. The geographical spread continues to be impressive with entries from every part of the globe: the US, Europe and the Far East were all well represented this year. The categories all had strong entries, keeping the competition as fierce as ever.

E-learning is an established, key part of the learning and development mix and looking at the winners it is fair to say that e-learning reaches far and wide. And the E-Learning Awards do the same.

As the leading competition and event in this sector of the learning, performance and development space, they represent and promote the very best this profession has to offer.

E-Learning Awards Citations

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Best use of social media for learning

Gold Winner: Deutsche Welle German Courses

Learning on your own isn’t much fun and makes learning a social and communication skill such as language particularly tough. Which is why Deutsche Welle’s CommunityD initiative is so effective. It brings under one online umbrella a range of social networking tools, including a Facebook site, a Twitter account with over 3,000 followers, podcasts and videos, that allow German learners all around the world to connect with each other. The Facebook presence even allows fans of German language learning soap opera Jojo sucht das Glück to contact the programme’s protagonist directly.

Users can generate and share text, audio, videos and photos. They can publish personal profiles listing their interest and language skills. A targeted search helps locate study partners and teachers. There are interactive classrooms, study groups catering to individual needs, audio and video chat, regular news posts, vocabulary and grammar exercises, and more. CommunityD has attracted 50,000 users in under two years, with 15,000 learners visiting the site every day.
Best use of synchronous e-learning

Gold Winner: Brightwave

The e-learning marketplace is awash with generic bite-sized learning modules for self-study. But ‘soft’ business skills such as communications and leadership are more effectively taught as discursive topics through exploration and group exercises.

Brightwave’s achievement with LiveTime is to wrap these skills into an interactive learning experience delivered by facilitators in 20-minute bursts via desktop computers and smartphones. Learners can share and solve, discuss ideas and make suggestions – all with help and guidance from classroom sessions delivered live three times every weekday. There are backup resources online, a Q&A period at the end of every session, Facebook and Twitter updates, and access to recorded sessions.

There are over 100 modules covering management and leadership, business and organisation, and communications and interpersonal. The little and often approach keeps learners engaged, while the low cost appeals to small businesses in particular.

The underpinning VoIP-based Adobe Connect Pro technology avoids the need for plug-ins or system changes, and keeps bandwidth usage low.
Best learning game, simulation or virtual environment

Gold Winner: Train4TradeSkills

Developing vocational skills requires practice but learning from mistakes can be expensive in terms of raw materials costs. To address this, Train4TradeSkills has created a highly realistic and fun virtual practice environment for learning skills such as plumbing and carpentry.

The custom-built controller is shown onscreen as whatever tool is being used. It detects movement around all three axes, so users move, twist, tilt and rotate it exactly as they would the real tool.

The feedback mechanisms help students internalise practices as they would in a workshop. So when threading a steel pipe, the user doesn’t see a message saying the pipe has been threaded; instead they have to watch for the end of the pipe to emerge from the die and stop at the appropriate point.

The gameplay catches the essence of the processes to be learned while keeping users engaged by avoiding too much repetition. The aim is to ensure users can recognise when a process is completed as they would in real life, not by counting repetitions, but by checking to see.

Silver Winner: Parliament's Education Service & Preloaded

‘Your country needs you’ is the tagline for Preloaded’s MyUK game, which teaches how laws are made. Players choose and pass new laws, and take on the role of prime minister in shaping the country. Bills can be amended in the face of political opposition and party whips dispatched to twist MPs’ arms. The light-hearted game allows players to remodel Big Ben and push through the Gigantic UK-Irish Ocean Filter Bill. A humorous way to understand how Westminster works.

Bronze Winner: Caspian Learning/Interplay Energy

The InterCAZ game allows students to practice numerous combustion safety scenarios with almost unlimited variability. It delivers certification-quality learning for highly complex tasks in a tightly regulated area, with successful completion helping home safety engineers to retain their professional licence.

Users start the immersive online game outside one of a series of test houses equipped with a set of inspection tools. They take measurements, test appliances and set up sensor tests, logging results, their actions and notes on a virtual clipboard. Fifty different variables can be randomly configured or tailored to the student.
Best use of rapid e-learning content

Gold Winner: BT Learning & Development – SSV – eLearning & Multimedia

With 14 million customers to keep happy, BT relies on the 14,000 advisers in its contact centres to get things right by closing problems down with the first call made by the customer. However, the company found that reducing the ‘breakage rate’ (the failure to solve the problem in one call) by taking its advisers offline for short training periods was expensive, while internal written communications had little impact.

The solution was found in a series of short sharp videos (SSVs). The SSVs are a set of over 50 informally presented videos, between just three and five minutes in length, target specific problems. Short and punchy, they have successfully engaged staff in how to follow the correct procedures. Simple and straightforward, this proactive business support venture was so popular that many more were made than originally envisaged. The SSVs have helped drive up one-contact resolution by 11%, which equates to a £1.6m saving.

Silver Winner: McDonald's UK and Kineo

This blended learning package used stripped-down templates to accelerate the assembly of content, which was then developed into Powerpoint-like modules accessible from any computer. The Articulate-based modules started off by covering financial skills, inventory management, and crew/management scheduling. They incorporate a wide range of user interactions, are easy for McDonalds to maintain and update, and have delivered over £5m in savings in two years.

Bronze Winner: Unicorn Training Group

With 6,000 staff without a financial services background to train in an insurance product, and six weeks to move from concept to delivery, it was in at the deep end for Unicorn. Its training puts users in an e-workplace where customers ask them questions; if they don’t know the answer, they can pop back into the virtual office to find it with the help of interactive tools and a mentor.
XML text combined with a template that uses easily changeable background graphics and scenario characters solved the initial client’s request. It has also allowed Unicorn to build it out, simply by substituting scripts and graphics.
Best use of mobile learning

Gold Winner: Epic and Harper Collins

Achievement in mathematics by British students is often regarded as abysmal, with 45% failing to reach GCSE grade C. This project takes mathematics out of books and puts it where teenage digital natives most like to find stuff: in iPod apps.

The four separate apps cover the entire GCSE maths curriculum. They offer a total of 1,200 maths questions, revisions cards for quick access to topics, and tests with feedback recommending areas the student needs to work on. There are even tutorials in the form of 130 video clips, that provide supporting explanations through storytelling memory aids and ‘student voice’ problem walkthroughs to maximise user engagement.

Advanced bookmarking allows students to pause and restart what they’re doing at any point, making it easier to use small windows of what would otherwise be downtime, such as bus journeys. With ‘pinch to zoom’ graphs and diagrams, it’s fun, effective and cool.

Silver Winner: Encyclopædia Britannica

Informative, engaging and visually stunning, Britannica’s Kids apps blow their rivals – the distinctly low-quality games with which the App Store is stuffed – out of the water. The nine Kids titles explain the human and natural world through interactive learning games such as memory match, magic squares, brush-offs and quizzes, as well as age-appropriate articles for primary school children. GPS mapping allows users to located the nearest Roman ruin, castle, snake habitat, volcano, etc.

Silver Winner: LINE Communications and the Royal School of Artillery

Sticking gunners in a classroom to watch endless Powerpoint slides in how to direct attacks and fire missiles and giving them folders full of information to wade through simply didn’t work very well. LINE’s iPad-based blended alternative has been inspirational. Competitive and digitally engaged, squaddies haven’t been able to get enough of it, taking their iPads out back in the barracks to launch impromptu gunnery practice races with their mates. All the written courseware is also on the iPad. It has shortened training times, improved first-time pass rates and reduced exam resits, saving considerable amounts of money.
Most innovative new learning hardware or software product

Gold Winner: Train4TradeSkills

Train4TradeSkills has created an innovative and advanced platform capable of producing a highly engaging, interactive 3D experience for any manual skill.

The company’s hand-held Unanomote device acts, looks and feels like a screwdriver, a drill, a saw, or any other tool it is modelling. A remote camera tracks the Unanomote in 2D space, and contains a sensor equipped with accelerometers, magnetometers and gyrometers that allows the Unanomote to replicate any rotating motion. A pressure pad permits fine control and gives a realistic physical feel of a tool. A vibration generator replicates the feedback from electric tools.

Trainees use it to practise a task just as they would in a workshop, but for as many times as they need to in a realistic environment. When a user feels they have mastered the task in virtual reality, they go into the workshop and perform it for real.
The engine allows Train4TradeSkills not only to cater for many different skill types, but also to produce training at a fraction of the traditional virtual reality cost by using modules put together by people with minimal experience in design and programming.

Silver Winner: DH e-Learning for Healthcare: e-Fetal Monitoring (e-FM)

e-LfH has developed an e-learning solution to improve training of obstetricians and midwives by simulating clinical practice in interpreting electronic traces (CTGs) during labour. Its case study generator allows clinical experts to act as content authors without technical support. Design features include the use of real CTGs, the requirement for learners to highlight abnormalities accurately on the trace, the incorporation of views from three medico-legal experts throughout each case, and targeted feedback after each hour of labour.

Bronze Winner: Curatr by HT2

Software tool Curatr stimulates participation in social learning. Using a museum metaphor, it offers learners the opportunity to acquire, organise and then share learning objects, which can be any digital content, hosted anywhere. The objects are displayed as nodes in concentric circles, with the more useful positioned closer to the centrepoint. The positional judgement is made algorithmically on the basis of learner usage. Clicking on objects brings up information about them. Users gain access to higher levels of objects by viewing content, commenting, contributing content and passing tests. Addictive, engrossing and motivating.

Bronze Winner: Fusion Universal

This radically different approach from the well-trodden corporate training path recognises that video and social media are the most popular learning tools with users. The platform makes it ridiculously easy to share virtually any kind of media, and includes a built-in video capture and editing tool. This is combined with closed and open communities, micro-blogs, playlists, a notification engine and a powerful tagging/hierarchical tool to allow experts and frontline staff alike to create and refine collaborative content with ease.
Best use of e-learning to ensure compliance with external regulations or internal policies

Gold Winner: CA Technologies

At IT company CA Technologies all 13,000 staff across the world undergo security training every year to meet ISO certification demands and to address the biggest security risk of all – people. And every year a third party conducts three social engineering tests – phone fraud, email phishing and USB drops – to see how effective that training is. But with the training consisting of users clicking Next buttons on a series of onscreen slides, the test results were, frankly, appalling: 77% failed the phone scam.

A new approach prioritised interactive training. The much shorter one-hour course begins with the mock interrogation of an employee for breaching security. The learner is then placed in a virtual office where clicking on different parts of the screen elicit security information. Finally, the learner runs through several real-life scenarios to identify whether they are potential breaches.
The success of the e-learning is clear from that year’s battery of social engineering tests, with the failure rate falling by two-thirds.

Silver Winner: RBS Group

A high-profile casualty of the financial crisis, RBS needed to reset its approach to risk to satisfy the regulator and centralise risk training. It did so with a single suite of 11 e-learning modules written from a learner’s point of view. Engaging and relevant to all 150,000 staff around the world from the CEO down to the newest recruit, it swept away the jargon and the lists of regulation.

Bronze Winner: Epic and the BBC

An ingenious learning experience has turned 400 pages of content on the BBC’s editorial guidelines into manageable and memorable modules. Learners are taken through gritty, real-life dilemmas that editors and TV producers face on a daily basis, using real scripts and programme clips such as gruesome images of a nurse being impaled and a young girl being knocked over by an ambulance from an episode of Casualty to bring home the ethics of violence in drama. An excellent learning experience for an incredibly demanding audience.
Best e-learning project securing widespread adoption

Gold Winner: Information Transfer and Cambian Group

With the care sector both highly regulated and intensely competitive, training is a key business driver for mental health and learning disability service provider Cambian. Training capability is seen as a key element in service quality by local councils and is therefore an important differentiator. Having acquired another service provider, the business decided to grasp the nettle of the high costs, inconsistency and risk presented by its locally sourced face-to-face training regime.

It appointed Information Transfer to develop an e-learning solution with the goal of saving £200k annually, training all new recruits in one week rather than two, and allowing training compliance to match business growth. It did so by extensively consulting staff to achieve buy-in and generate structured e-learning modules covering a range of training requirements, with linked offline activities and integrated assessment.

The focus on stakeholder engagement and learner needs led to enthusiastic adoption and enormous take-up. Not only were all the goals achieved, but the projected budget savings are double the anticipated figure.

Silver Winner: BP and Kineo

Globally dispersed and largely sceptical of e-learning, the 12,000 operational leaders BP wanted training in safety culture were a tough nut for Kineo to crack. And given their shift-based work meant they would be doing the training in their time off, the solution had to be exceptionally engaging. Kineo used a blend of scenario and simulation based on real BP sites, posing technical problems the learner had to solve. Challenging and thought-provoking, all 12,000 staff have completed the training, which is credited with halving safety incidents in the US, the first roll-out area.
Best online distance learning programme

Gold Winner: RM Lightbox/National College for School Leadership

Lightbox has created a gripping solution with an awesome reach. The online modules have been accessed by 99% of registered participants, and the client’s advisers, who are long-standing offline mentors, have unanimously described it as excellent.
It takes a flexible approach to a relatively small but enormously disparate group training to become headteachers. As well as high-flier teachers, the group includes many professionals already established in one career but looking to change, who are time-poor and geographically dispersed

A set of traditional e-learning materials allow participants to study the theory and then plunge into the immersive experience of the Mind – a suite of 50 or so video-based dilemmas presented over the course of a working week. The learner chooses between a number of scenarios, some of which escalate if ignored, while others are merely distractions. The volume is intentionally impossible to complete, forcing the learner to prioritise and make decisions on partial information.
Consequences of decisions are played out onscreen, and then an expert’s opinion given, challenging learners to reconsider their decisions, beliefs and preconceptions. Riveting and addictive.

Silver Winner: Workplace Law Environmental

A quality blended educational tool, this environmental management training has taken a 19% slice of the market since its launch and has achieved a 100% pass rate. In a fast-growing, rapidly evolving area of regulation, online delivery allows inexpensive content development. Tailored news feeds, case reviews and briefings accompany the interactive exercises, video case studies, audio hints, tutor webinars, user forum and quizzes.
Excellence in the production of learning content - not for profit sector

Gold Winner: LINE Communications and AO Foundation

When feedback showed AO that its bone fracture classification system, its cornerstone course, was seen by surgeons as among the dullest and hardest to master, it called on LINE to help.

LINE combined narrative, gaming and realistic practice to create an immersive learning tool that surgeons of all backgrounds and levels of experience identify with and find absorbing. Crucially, younger surgeons say the learning approach and style helps them properly internalise the AO/Müller fracture classification system by giving them ample opportunity to practice and refresh their newly learnt ability with the help of an unprecedented collection of real-life x-rays.

The learner is assigned the role of resident in a busy A&E hospital as victims of a road accident arrive. The learner then takes over diagnosis, accessing reference material on the classification system as the narrative continues. Each x-ray becomes an absorbing contest in correct identification. The engaging approach motivates learners, while time-limited fracture identification exercises add a competitive edge to the testing that appeals to a driven audience.

Silver Winner: St George's, University of London

St George’s has created four microsites to increase access to medical training by students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The sites challenge stereotypes that medical students come only from privileged backgrounds and give support to students developing appropriate skills and competencies. Each site targets a different level of educational development, and is equipped with videos, scenario-based tasks, interactive brain games and extension activities. For those who dream of being doctors, it’s stimulating, informative and fun.

Bronze Winner: League Football Education, Sportiv8 and Kineo

This e-learning offers numeracy and literacy skills for apprentice footballers, using a non-traditional approach to draw in learners who are often disengaged and hard to reach. It uses videos based on a group of young athletes sharing a flat for a training camp. The audio-led narrative presents authentic and engaging scenarios as the athletes make decisions about fitness levels, training regimes and nutrition, as well as do chores and calculate the food budget for the week. Video vox pops and tutorials add to the interest.
Excellence in the production of learning content - public sector

Gold Winner: Epic and the BBC

Editorial judgement is a crucial skill for BBC staff. Get it wrong and literally thousands of people will besiege the phone lines with complaints while thundering denunciations are issued in parliament. So when revising its editorial guidelines last year, the BBC decided to find a better way of making its 400-page volume of guidelines stick in staff minds.

The result is an inspirational set of 20 manageable and memorable e-learning modules that have raised editorial standards and minimised business risk. Between eight and 20 minutes long, the modules use real-life dilemmas to help encourage impartiality, accuracy and sensitivity in reporting.

Accessible and unpatronising, the modules incorporate sometimes harrowing clips from BBC programmes, putting learners in the producer hot seat to decide whether content should be changed, and if so how. Other modules incorporate conflicts of interest, with the learner taking different roles to help decide the best course of action. Decision-based feedback and tips are given.
User response has been overwhelmingly favourable, with the BBC estimating it is benefiting from around 1,900 better editorial decisions every month.

Silver Winner: abcenglish, International Learning Centre and Wigan Council

This course for newly settled asylum seekers in Wigan uses videos to demonstrate language, provide colour and model integration as well as provide a language learning vehicle by the use of audio translations within the transcripts. Interactive exercises, Q&As, formative and summative tests, written exercises with tutor feedback and tutor-corrected student recordings all take place on the portal itself, creating a holistic and supportive learning experience. Feedback was entirely positive and the e-learning met all the client’s targets.

Bronze Winner: NPIA/NCALT: Mental Ill Health and Learning Disability Awareness

Part of a bigger mental ill health learning programme, this course addresses inconsistent training in the police service. Five video-based scenarios impart essential knowledge and skills. Intelligible without being condescending, and relevant to the day-to-day working lives of police officers, they immerse the learner in true-to-life situations that encapsulate a wide spectrum of information, best practice and reflection.
Excellence in the production of learning content - private sector

Gold Winner: eCom Scotland in partnership with Howden

Engineering company Howden runs three-week classroom-based courses to help its graduate recruits develop rapidly into their new job roles. But with too much time being spent on topics that were neither job-related nor deeply technical, it decided to introduce pre-programme e-learning to increase the efficiency of the face-to-face course.

eCom Scotland accordingly developed 39 modules, adding video to the content to help explain such phenomena as vibration, with a clip of the notorious Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse.

Animation is also deployed extensively to illustrate many engineering principles. Learners can see graphs moving and items flexing and control the animations to explore the theories being imparted.

The channelling of some of what used to be classroom content into the e-learning has freed up 30% of the classroom schedule to focus on job-related skills that are costly or difficult to replicate in e-learning. Some 90% of Howden’s line managers say new engineers now become more effective more quickly.

Silver Winner: Boots in partnership with Mind Click

E-courses to support stock file maintenance and imminent changes to the process at Boots stores changed the behaviour of a highly diverse employee base, and increased stock file accuracy across all stores in every month since they were launched. An X-Factor metaphor of backstage (the why and the what), rehearsal and live performance was employed, with the store as the stage, and content and activities action-mapped to engage staff. Easy to follow, cleverly pitched and very impressive.

Silver Winner: Compass Group and Kineo

This transition from face-to-face facilitated training in financial performance management to inspiring, realistic and visually attractive e-learning got people excited and delivered real business results. The graphics are engaging and scenarios convincing with a strong Cluedo problem-solving treatment integrated with decision-making elements. It gives just-in-time training with simultaneous learning and application and has reduced classroom time by 75%, saving the client an estimated £500k.

Bronze Winner: essential.genius

This online e-learning series offers an easy and effective way to learn the tools, techniques and principles of Lean Six Sigma and business improvement. The seven courses cover DPMO and process Sigma, SIPOC diagrams, flowcharts, control charts, process standardisation, mistake proofing and data analysis using plain English, audio, colourful graphics and animation. Learners are presented with scenarios and undertake interactive exercises, making decisions or carrying out mathematical calculations on the processes.

Bronze Winner: Purple Media

This e-learning course to train 2,500 retail staff in 13 countries in product knowledge engages a young audience with dynamic, interactive and graphically rich content. Learners engage with virtual customers to learn and demonstrate service and sales techniques. Dynamic XML text underpins multilingual scalability and language switchability in the course. Not surprisingly, store managers love it because it reduces their training burden.
E-learning industry award for outstanding achievement - individual

Winner: Mike Booth – Cable & Wireless

Mike Booth, learning technologies manager at Cable & Wireless, is undoubtedly a technologist, but one who never lets himself be seduced by the latest technology fad. For him, it’s all about getting the best out of proven technologies to deliver cost-effective solutions.

At Cable & Wireless, he changed the solution to meet the business need, leading the move from a managed outsourced service to a flexible mix of low-cost technologies, rapid development and a simpler interface to respond rapidly to changing demands. He has also promoted a large webinar programme across the company, attracting anything between 150 and 400 attendees and saving the business £200k in year one.

He’s a convincing e-learning advocate, freely giving his time to speak at events and write up articles. In doing so, he always focuses on the benefits that e-learning delivers, backed up with practical case studies. No theorising, no hot air, no advocacy of the untried – just real experience backed up by hard evidence.
E-learning industry award for outstanding achievement - corporate

Winner: Sky in partnership with Brightwave

Sky partnered with Brightwave to reshape its e-learning from top to bottom.

A custom-built staff learning management system called Development Studio has been made available via an intranet. It hosts all the company’s e-learning courses, downloads, books and training. All new recruits to Sky’s contact centre are given access to the interactive pre-learning portal before they join.

Five e-learning modules were developed to help Sky advisers understand the company’s broadband and talk products and services. The Sky team built the cityscape wrapper that allows all modules to report and track independently, and Brightwave developed the individual modules.

A full development curriculum was created for Sky News, with e-learning, 50 bespoke video clips and a custom video player. Other e-learning developments around compliance include a data protection module, an immersive 3D health and safety course for Sky managers, and a module for resolving customer dispute escalations.

The partners also combined to produce a course that communicates the key features of the new Sky Go product.
E-learning internal project team of the year

Winner: Crown Prosecution Service

The Crown Prosecution Service has shown creativity and commitment in driving the learning ethos in the organisation at a time of budget cuts in traditional learning methods.

Last year its implementation of a new acceptance of pleas topic as e-learning saved the organisation £100k in eliminating the direct costs of the classroom alternative alone; the true savings across the business (from eliminating lawyer extraction and subsistence costs, etc) were probably around six times that figure.

This is a lean and efficient team. For example, it greatly shrunk the development period for the acceptance of pleas topic by implementing wireframing techniques that allowed scripting in real time. And it’s not just about rapid content production; quality and effectiveness are bedrock parameters. Content is fine-tuned through unerring reliance on stringent post-course evaluation, and the acceptance of pleas course, for example, incorporates a mandatory test delivering a 90% pass rate over the two attempts allowed – irrefutable evidence of a knowledge increase.
E-learning development company of the year based overseas

Winner: Michael Management Corporation

Founded in 2000 to address the perceived inconvenience, expense and ineffectiveness of training in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, MMC has become the leading provider of online SAP training.

As the largest player in the market for ERP products, which are a key element of the IT infrastructures of large corporates, particularly manufacturing companies, SAP had a strong hold on the ERP training market. MMC has injected competition into the market, giving SAP customers a viable choice in how, when and how thoroughly to train their staff in the SAP suite.

MMC built a compelling business by offering customers an e-learning solution at a time when SAP held regional training seminars. Its e-learning is interactive, with simulated exercises and hands-on sessions rather than passive Powerpoint presentations. The online delivery also allowed MMC to undercut SAP on price. Finally, MMC instituted end-of-course exams rather than relying on course attendance certificates.

It has been a convincing and successful business model that has seized a powerful share of the market and shows no sign of flagging.
E-learning development company of the year

Gold Winner: Unicorn Training Group

With 20 years of consistent growth, Unicorn shows no sign of letting up.

In 2010 the company launched its Web 2.0 platform SkillsServe, which has amassed well over 100,000 end-users working for more than 200 organisations in the UK and the US. And earlier this year it launched a North American operation with compliance solutions provider Wolters Kluwer Financial Services (WKFS).

The WKFS partnership is a model of how Unicorn works. In creating mandatory e-learning compliance courses for the US securities industry, Unicom stuck to its student engagement guns. Each course began with a short movie clip featuring a professional actor talking emotionally direct to camera about how they came to be in jail or some other dire situation as a result of not following or understanding regulatory requirements. Short, sharp and salutary, it holds the attention and combines with embedded case studies and real-life scenarios to great effect.

Silver winner: Walkgrove

Neither the biggest nor brashest provider of e-learning and blended training, this 17-year-old business enjoys an excellent reputation. It prides itself on being ethical, modest and competent, and gets in return loyalty and commitment. But perhaps most of all, its key differentiator is its audience empathy: the company has vowed never to subject its students to the hundreds of screens’ worth of impenetrable information and unbearably patronising learning that characterise e-learning at its worst.

Photos of the 2011 winners