It’s been a year since we started blogging (March 03, 2009) and we are raring to go another notch high. With 142 posts, over 75,500 page views, and 600+ subscriber base, it’s been an enjoyable journey so far. A big thanks to all our loyal readers for taking the time to read and for leaving your valuable comments. We sincerely appreciate your continued patronage. We look forward to a great 2010!
A large blank white wall is an invitation for creative individuals to express themselves. Some call it graffiti, some call it art, all in all its great fun. We had just such a wall at our offices in Pune.
We decided to make the best of it and let graphic designers and artists from the team have a go at it.
The results speak for themselves.
Dr. Bhaskar Chatterjee, the chief guest at the CLO Summit India earlier this month, spoke that mistakes should be part of a learning organization’s culture. That resonated strongly with me. I have written about how we all learn more from mistakes. At Upside Learning do ask all our employees to not be afraid of making mistakes.
Upside Learning sponsored the inaugural CLO Summit India at the end of last week. My partner Amit Gautam and I attended the summit and came back satisfied with the level of participation seen at this inaugural summit. Overall we felt it was a great inaugural event that pulled in some respected names to speak. There were some equally respected names in the audience too. We feel the CLO Summit has the potential to grow into a premier HR event in India focused around L&D. If the organizers can build a community around this , it will be even more wonderful. We of course, are happy to have assisted the first edition in our little way.
When new employees join at Upside Learning, I tell them – “Making mistakes is ok because you learn from them and that’s the real value of a mistake as it gets you ready for success. So go ahead, work with a free mind, give your best, and everything else would be fine”. Note that it’s not a license to make mistakes it is the freedom to try your best and be ok when you make mistakes. I also tell them “while committing mistakes is ok, repeating them is not, as then the mistake is really costly – to them and to the company, as we did not get anything (hoping for some learning there) out of it”
It seems more and more like this recession will further enhance the position of eLearning amongst various training options an organization could choose from for their learning and development initiatives. In March earlier this year I wrote – ‘while the times are tough, they are on our side’ (by ‘our’ I meant all technology enabled learning solution providers). Then In May I’d posted about the growth of eLearning outsourcing as projected by an India-based research agency – Valuenotes and more recently about how training companies are adopting eLearning using us as their training back-office. All of these lead upto what I have always believed in – that this downturn will lead to renewed growth in eLearning industry. Here’s more to support that thought.
Six in ten people (more than 4 billion individuals) around the world are carrying a powerful computing device in their pockets and purses. They don’t realize it, but today’s mobile phones have the computing power of a personal computer from the mid-nineties, while consuming a fraction of the energy and are made at significantly lower cost.
Upside Learning has picked up 2 awards at the 21st Annual Apex Awards for Publication Excellence 2009. You may ask – what is a learning solutions company doing at publication awards? Well, the core of what we do is communication and Apex has categories for the kind of work eLearning vendors do.
Yes, I know haven’t posted anything interesting last few days. That’s because I’ve been in training this week; and would you believe it was Retail Sales training. What’s an instructional designer doing attending sales training?
Workplace Learning is changing!





