A course is web-based instructional content delivered to you on your computer. During the course, you practise and are assessed on your mastery of the skills and knowledge learned in the course.

The following types of courses are available:

• Business Skills courses
• IT courses
• Live Learning courses
• Instructor-Led Training (ILT) courses

Live Learning courses are a derivative of traditional, instructor-led technical training. However, rather than gathering students in one physical location, lectures are delivered by instructors to participants with streaming audio, video presentations and application sharing over the Internet. Lectures are also available as recordings for on-demand viewing.

Live Learning courses are hosted and delivered as a collection of launchables. They can contain the following learning assets:

• Expert Live sessions
• Expert Encore sessions
• Supporting learning assets

Live Learning Expert Live Sessions

Live Learning Expert Live sessions are live, webcast instructional sessions taught at specific, scheduled dates and times by a team of expert instructors.

Live Learning Expert Encore Sessions

Recorded sessions for on-demand viewing or reviewing of Expert Live sessions.

Supporting Learning Assets

Supporting materials can include the following related learning assets:

Live Learning class notes

Live Learning student guide

Live Learning lab

Live Learning mentor

Live Learning pre-test

Live Learning practice exam

Live Learning post-test

After you enrol in a Live Learning course, all of its assets become available to you on the course summary page.

Note: If you have difficulty printing a Live Learning student guide, refer to the Live Learning troubleshooting topic in the Product Knowledge Base for assistance.

Instructor-Led Training (ILT) courses are scheduled courses that you attend at a specific time. An ILT course can have one or more sessions, which are scheduled instances of the course. There are 2 types of ILT sessions:

• ILT physical sessions: These sessions are held at physical locations, for example, a classroom or conference room.
• ILT virtual sessions: These sessions are delivered online using tools such as SkillSoft's Dialogue Live.

You can enrol yourself in a session of an ILT course, or your manager or training administrator can enrol you. Depending on the configuration of your site, your manager may need to approve the enrolment if you enrol yourself. If your manager enrols you, you are notified by email of the location, duration, time and date of the scheduled session.

If no sessions of a course are currently available (that is, there are no scheduled sessions or if all scheduled sessions are full), you can add a course to your watch list in order to be notified when a new session is scheduled.

Business Exploration Series courses provide learners with engaging, visually rich, scenario-based learning that enables them to experience real world situations in safe, exploratory environments. These learning assets use video and Flash to make the learning experience engaging and authentic.

Business Exploration Series courses can be one of two types:

• Business Impact Series: Media-rich dramatisations of frequently-encountered business problems. Use these to pick up on best practices and things to avoid in various business scenarios.
• Challenge Series: Media-rich case studies focused on content analysis, problem solving and decision making. Each challenge presents learners with a specific objective or goal, along with the related discovery material and multiple potential solutions. Learners are challenged to analyse a business problem and discovery material, select one of several potential solutions, and then defend or justify their selections by answering questions about the selected outcome.

Job aids are standalone documents intended to the support transfer of knowledge and skills from courses to the workplace. They are performance-support tools designed to be used on an ongoing basis, or around a specific work-focused events, such as performance reviews, interviewing or strategic planning. Job Aids are not dependent on course content.

If a Job Aid is available for a particular course, you can launch it from the course summary page.

SkillBriefs are single-page, condensed summaries of the instructional content of a course topic. Use SkillBriefs as an instant reference after you have completed a course.

If a SkillBrief is available for a particular course, you can launch it from the course summary page.

Books cover a wide range of business and IT-related subjects. You can search Books24x7 for book titles using SEARCH&LEARN. You can also access the Books24x7 site directly by clicking the shortcut on the navigation panel if it has been enabled for your site.

In addition to standard books, there are several types of books whose content is tailored to meet various business needs:

• Analyst Perspectives: Summaries of the views of many different analyst firms. Analyst Perspectives provide insight into their research and opinions on IT and telecommunications in a context that helps planners and decision makers at all levels make better informed decisions. With hundreds of research firms tracking the technology industry, Analyst Perspectives help you to select and apply the right reports to your business needs.
• Executive Book Summaries (ExecSummaries): Summaries of leading business books from today's foremost business authors. ExecSummaries expertly encapsulate the salient points and ideas of full-length books into digestible, 8-page summaries. Unlike excerpts or reviews, ExecSummaries skillfully distill the essence of the author's work, conveying content, style and spirit. Designed for ease-of-use with short passages, bulleted lists, and other useful elements, these thorough, yet concise high-level overviews represent cutting-edge ideas that are shaping today's business environment.
• Executive Blueprints (ExecBlueprints): Easy-to-absorb practical information and best practices to help provide a framework for taking near-term action on pressing business issues. Authored by top C-level business executives who are regarded as leaders and innovators in their fields, these reports provide information to help formulate planning and action. They are designed to succinctly convey the key issues, metrics, lessons learned, milestones, timelines and action plans required for successful execution.

Express guides are electronically-delivered equivalents of the student guides that IT professionals receive when they attend instructor-led training classes. They consist primarily of text and graphics and do not contain interactive practise questions or assessments.

Learning Sparks are innovative, instructional products, designed primarily for information technology subjects such as Cisco and IT Security. Learning Sparks make learning fun by engaging learners in highly interactive scenarios.

A KnowledgeCenter™ is a pre-packaged, user-friendly learning portal that allows learners instant access to trusted, targeted content. Each KnowledgeCentre includes material selected by subject matter experts to help learners to build knowledge around a topic quickly and efficiently. KnowledgeCenter materials can include featured topics refreshed on a monthly basis, Books24x7 online books and reference materials, SkillSoft courses, Live Learning courses and related assets, SkillSims, practice labs, projects, and more.

SkillSoft Leadership Advantage (SLA) is a targeted leadership development programme comprised of a collection of learning assets that have been thoughtfully selected and organized by leadership experts.

Individual learning tracks offer a combination of new and existing SkillSoft and Books24x7 assets that combine multiple modes of instruction, including text, video, and interactive practice activities that are intended to keep the learning quick, easy, and engaging. Each track is designed to take no more than two hours to complete, although you can complete as much or as little of any track in one sitting as you wish.

Videos covers a variety of business and leadership related themes. Videos include:

• Leadership QuickTalks
• CEO QuickTalks
• On-Demand versions of Live Events
• Live Video Events

A SkillSim (SkillSoft simulation) is a technology-enabled simulation that puts you in an authentic business or professional situation.

You play a major role in a variety of simulated interactions where your decisions have a direct impact on the course of events and result in realistic consequences. The SkillSim is designed to help you practise or assess your mastery of the skills and knowledge learnt in a series of SkillSoft courses. As you progress through a series of scenes, you will receive feedback on your performance. To assist you, the simulation incorporates links to context sensitive SkillSoft course material.

Dialogue sessions are recorded or live virtual meetings, classes and training sessions delivered using the Internet. Dialogue sessions can include interactive features such as chat, polling, audio, whiteboard, quizzes and more. They can also incorporate prepared presentations.

Projects give IT professionals the opportunity to test their skills in structured learning environments that reflect real-world situations. They consist of extensive programmes of unified, integrated projects that challenge developers to solve practical business problems, and they foster the acquisition of core programming skills.

Use a hosted IDE or Microsoft Visual Studio to build a robust business application by completing a series of coding projects. SkillSoft's innovative code judging application can evaluate your solutions, provide targeted feedback, and pinpoint helpful reference materials.

Practice labs are designed to help you practise and assess your current skill levels and maintain ongoing expertise. An expert introduction provides you with insights and key pointers to the core skills practised in the lab. After the introduction, you work in a learning environment that replicates a real-world job situation, and you complete hands-on exercises designed to build a rounded aggregation of competencies and skills.

SkillSoft exams are generally taken near the end of a programme of certification-orientated study. There are two types of exam: Test Prep Exams and Final Exams.

Test Prep Exams

These are practise tests that help you to prepare for a certification exam. You can take a test prep exam in Study Mode (where you receive feedback after each question) or in Certification Mode (designed to mimic a certification exam).

Final Exams

These are final tests associated with a series of courses or learning paths. Questions are drawn from all courses in the series to create an inclusive exam to test your knowledge of the subject matter. You demonstrate your competency with the associated courseware by successfully completing the Final Exam. In some cases, you must complete a Final Exam in order to earn college credits or to meet the requirements for professional-level certifications.

Mentoring provides a convenient way of accessing the Ask My Mentor feature for a particular course or certification path. Mentoring assets map to specific certification exams, and, therefore they appear in the CATALOGUE beneath the applicable exams in a certification-related curricula folder.

You can access mentoring support by clicking in one of the following locations:

• A course summary page that has a related mentoring offering. Browse the certification-related curricula folders in the CATALOGUE or search explicitly for mentoring assets using SEARCH&LEARN.
• The objectives screen of a mentored exercise.

The Ask My Mentor page allows you to take advantage of three types of mentoring: live chats, questions and answers by email and daily messages.

Chat with a Mentor

If you have a quick question about a course or certification, your mentoring team can provide you with a quick answer. To enter a live chat with a mentor, click Chat with a Mentor.

Email My Mentor

If you have a detailed question about a course or certification, your Mentoring Team can provide you with a detailed answer via email. To email a mentor, click Email My Mentor.

Change Daily Email Options

You can receive daily email messages that contain questions and information relevant to the specific certification. To activate this feature and specify the frequency with which to receive messages, click Change Daily Email Options.

Note: This setting is only available when you access the mentoring asset from within a certification curriculum folder in the CATALOGUE.

External learning objects are any set of references that serve as learning activities and resources. They can include:

• Memberships in professional associations
• Subscriptions to (or articles in) journals/magazines
• On-the-job or off-the-job experiences
• Websites
• Internet news groups
• In-house policy/procedure manuals

You can add external learning assets to MY PLAN just as you do other assets.

Custom content includes both custom courses created from scratch and stock Skillsoft courses that have been customized.

A learning programme is a collection of learning assets that are grouped together based on subject matter, target audience, a learning goal or some other organising principle. The learner’s completion of a programme (and its individual assets) can be tracked. Learning programmes can include required and elective assets; they can also have a defined structure, requiring learners to complete the assets in a prescribed order.

The goal of a learning programme is to track your performance on the collection of learning assets. Before you can access the learning assets, and in order to start tracking your progress, you must enrol in the learning programme. Depending on the learning programme, the approval of your manager or training administrator may be required.

The details of a learning programme include important information, such as your enrolment status and the curriculum for the programme.

Note: A learning programme may or may not have a start date and end date. If it has a start date, this is the date that you can start taking the courses in the programme. If you access any learning assets prior to the start date, the progress you make prior to the start date is not counted towards completing the programme. Similarly, if the learning programme has an end date, this is the date by which you must complete all of the learning assets in the programme. If you do not finish all of the assets by the end date, you do not earn credit for completing the learning programme.

You do not need to add a learning programme to MY PLAN in order to launch the learning assets after you have enrolled. However, adding the learning programme to MY PLAN allows you to easily access it from the MY PLAN shortcut on the navigation panel. It also allows you to set up an associated e-mail reminder to help you complete it on time.

Some learning assets, such as courses and learning programmes, can have associated evaluation forms that allow you to provide feedback about your experience. In some cases, courses that you take as part of a credential require that you complete an evaluation in order to receive credit for the course.

If you complete an asset that has an associated evaluation, an evaluation is automatically added to the Evaluations folder in MY PLAN. (Evaluations for learning programmes and Live Learning courses are only added after the entire programme or course is completed.) After you complete the evaluation, it is then automatically removed from MY PLAN.

If the evaluation is optional, you do not have to complete it, and you can remove it from MY PLAN at any time.

If the evaluation is required, you can only remove it from MY PLAN by completing it. As a reminder, the application will prompt you to complete the required evaluation every time you log in.