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eCornell Joins with Center for Hospitality Research to Offer Online Executive Education Opportunity

Ithaca, NY, March 10, 2009 – Thousands of employees at some of the world’s foremost hospitality-related companies will gain preferred access to the online courses offered by eCornell, through a groundbreaking arrangement with Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research, eCornell, and the Office of Executive Education at the School of Hotel Administration. eCornell, which is a subsidiary of Cornell University, will become a full partner with the center in offering this opportunity.

“We continue to seek innovative and helpful methods to share research-based information with the industry, and to help industry practitioners improve their knowledge and skills,” said Jennifer Macera, associate director of the Center for Hospitality Research. “This is especially important in the current economic environment.”

“eCornell is excited to be working with the Center for Hospitality Research in this new type of partnership,” added Chris Proulx, Chief Executive Officer of eCornell. “eCornell has been working extensively with the hospitality industry since 2002 and we are pleased to provide this additional opportunity for industry employees.”

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Predictions for 2009

Every year at this time, eLearn Magazine asks experts in the field of e-learning to share their predictions about what lies ahead for the e-learning community. Following is a summary of their predictions for 2009.

  • Cellphones will emerge as the dominant learning platform for the developing world.
  • As organizations try to stretch their learning budgets in hard times, e-learning will become an attractive option.
  • Processes like ADDIE and classic ID will be used selectively or fragmented due to time and cost pressures. As the recession bites and training budgets are slashed, organizations will no longer be able to afford the production of sophisticated courseware. Instead they will become more reliant on employee-generated content and increasingly appreciate the potential of Web 2.0 approaches for informal, social, and collaborative learning, and knowledge sharing throughout the enterprise. E-learning will finally break free of the courses-online model as more people realize the business benefits of networked informal learning. Whether tethered to distinct courses or as ongoing communities of practice, the challenge is to create structures and activities that generate informal content—such as stories from the field—in support of learning, training, or performance goals. Learning professionals’ fears of obsolescence, expectations of connected employees, and demands for quicker solutions will drive the rest of us to increasingly abandon traditional instructional design in favor of experimentation—creating messy, loosely structured courses supplemented with low-cost social software and old-school support tools like job aids.
  • As economies worsen and country and state and provincial budgets tighten, free online courses, programs, and universities will increasingly be discussed, debated, and ultimately enrolled in. The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement will strengthen, and will face up to the “cultural” challenges of winning learning providers and
    teachers to use OER.
  • We’ll see more use of games (immersive learning simulations) as a powerful learning opportunity, and tools to make it easier to develop.

Read more.

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Cornell is big on entrepreneurship

Cornell has one of the strongest university-wide programs on entrepreneurship in the country.  The program “fosters the entrepreneurial spirit in every Cornell participant – in every college, every field, and every stage of life.”

The Cornell Chronicle recently published a great summary of recent activity by Cornell students who start businesses while still in school.

Entrepreneurship@Cornell is the organizing focal point for all of Cornell’s activities.

Typically, an economic downturn leads to a boost in new ventures and entrepreneurial activity because (1) people seek new opportunities after a layoff or in lieu of working for company in trouble, and (2) because the economic downturn often creates openings to new products, services, and “disruptive” technologies.  With many well-established companies in a more conservative position, strong upstarts can often find market share.

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Four eCornell Clients Win 2008 ASTD BEST Awards

Four eCornell clients were honored with 2008 ASTD BEST awards in October for excellence in workplace learning and performance.  ASTD selected forty companies that are among the “BEST at Building talent Enterprise-wide, Supported by the organization’s leaders fostering a Thorough learning culture.”

eCornell clients that were honored were:
#11 – Constellation Energy
#14 – Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.
#16 – Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC)
#23 – Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts

Air Products’ award in particular was based on their eCornell-focused program, the Management Fundamentals Program, which has served almost 800 employees since 2004. A typical employee participates in 13 eCornell courses.

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eCornell Announces New Online Certificate in Project Leadership

eCornell has announced the launch of a new online certificate program in Project Leadership.

The six-course certificate series in Project Leadership prepares learners to lead project and cross-functional teams to success. Project Leadership focuses on the essential leadership skills that lead to improved project management performance, recognizing that projects are social systems that exist within the social system of an organization. It is designed for Project Management Professionals (PMPs), project managers, and business managers responsible for project outcomes.

The courses are delivered by eCornell using its proven instructor-led Structured Flexibility model that combines the structure of a
well-defined course schedule, the flexibility of online learning, and access to subject-matter expert instructors to contextualize the learning and guide the learner to successful completion. Students who successfully complete all six courses in the Project Leadership series earn a Certificate in Project Leadership from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering in Cornell University’s College of Engineering.

“Leading projects when surrounded by the unpredictable is one of the toughest managerial challenges in organizational life. Yet increasingly, this is the grist of everyday life in today’s economy,” says certificate author Frank Wayno, Ph.D, a senior lecturer in the Cornell University College of Engineering. “eCornell has both encouraged and helped me to make the experiences and observations of 30 years of organizational consulting “come alive” for students trying to understand this type of environment…and more importantly, to tie those experiences to research from widely disparate fields to build the skills necessary to master this leadership challenge. We have taken a Cornell graduate course offered for over 17 years, with all the rigor, face-to-face interaction and debate found in an on-campus setting, and converted it to a series of distance courses that truly help students to both “see” projects as what they are: mini-social systems, and to develop the behavioral skills to become leading actors in those systems.”

eCornell is a Registered Education Provider with the Project Management Institute (PMI). The first course in the Project Leadership series has been approved for 6.0 PDUs by the PMI for PMPs. It is anticipated that each of the remaining five courses in the series will also be approved for approximately 6.0 PDUs.

Registrations are now being accepted for Project Leadership; courses will open to learners in November 2008 with certificate completion as early as March 2009.

The Project Leadership certificate and courses are available to individuals and as part of an eCornell corporate training solution.