When I was an undergraduate, I worked for a summer in the Phillips assembly plant in Eindhoven in The Netherlands. Life as a "gluer and screwer" or line assembly worker is quite repetitive, and repetitive, and repetitive, and repetitive, so my college friends and I tried to get to visit the cultural amenities of nearby Amsterdam as often as possible: yes, there are many galleries and museums to broaden a young man's mind in one of the jewels in Europe's crown - I recommend it.
After one particularly "cultural" weekend, my friends and I found ourselves in Centraal Station waiting for our train back to Eindhoven, and across the platform I saw an odd thing: a group of skiers! My initial thought was that I had hit the culture a little too hard, what would skiers be doing in the Low Countries (which after all, is famed for its plains, lack of topographical relief, and general flatness), and in the Summer, no less? 
Holland: notably bereft of the conditions for skiing
Eventually the answer seeped into my culture-addled brain: of course! They were going to the Alps! As a young lad from a small island nation on the western margin of Europe (the island without the Eurotunnel) it had simply never occurred to me that you could hop on a train in one country, and a few hours later be on the piste in Switzerland, Austria or Italy.
Living in Ireland, the only way I can travel off the island is by sea and 
by air. As a result of this situation, most Irish people have quite the soft spot for Aer Lingus, the Irish national airline. Until the emergence of Ryanair and other low-cost carriers, flying Aer Lingus was the only way to travel to foreign lands quickly and comfortably: it's how I travelled to go on the piste (as it were) in Holland after all.
So I'm pleased to see that Aer Lingus have decided to use Moodle (another organization I have a much admiration for) for their Online Pilot Training 
courses. The aviation industry has been involved with e-learning for over twenty years - indeed, the first generally-used e-learning specification AICC was an aviation industry initiative, developing guidelines for the development, delivery, and evaluation of computer-based, and Web-based Training (and related training technologies).
AICC specifications are usually designed to be general purpose (and not necessarily aviation specific) so that learning technology vendors can spread their costs across multiple markets and thus provide products at a lower cost. This strategy has resulted in AICC specifications having broad acceptance and relevance to non-aviation and aviation users alike. Even today, AICC PENS (Package Exchange Notification Services) is a broadly-used standard implemented in many e-learning authoring packages, such as Adobe Captivate.
Aer Ling chose Enovation, an Irish Moodle Partner, to undertake on the consultancy in the project. Using Moodle, Enovation provided the following services in line with Aer Lingus’s technical requirements:
- Hosting – Provided secure solution hosting for Aer Lingus courseware.
- Training – Provided hands-on training to all administration staff at Aer Lingus.
- Reporting – To comply with industry regulations, Aer Lingus has to produce a report to show that users view and complete all tasks within Moodle. As part of this, Enovation integrated the third-party reporting solution, Jaspersoft, with Moodle to allow administrators to report on user activity.
- Branding – Enovation customized Moodle to match the Aer Lingus branding.
- Support – Enovation implemented a Web-based issue reporting and tracking system for Aer Lingus.
- Courseware – Enovation worked with Aer Lingus to transform their original course content into the Moodle environment.
According to Conor Rock, Training Captain at Aer Lingus,
Moodle has been universally well received by the pilots and we have reduced our training costs, what can I say - the project has been a huge success.
Captain Rock continued that Moodle could be used in other domains within Aer Lingus:
Moodle has obvious potential in other areas. I see Aer Lingus expanding Moodle to the wider employee base for cabin crew and technical training.
Next time: back to ISD
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