Cylix announces next-generation health and safety training

E-learning development specialists Cylix (www.cylix.co.uk) have announced the imminent release of Health & Safety Essentials, a next-generation e-learning course aimed at providing employees with the knowledge and skills they need to stay safe and well at work.

The new course will extend the company’s readymade e-learning offer, which already includes the highly-popular Equality & Diversity in Practice range, currently being deployed by organisations such as Yahoo!, Manchester City Council, RWE npower and the University of Essex.

“Developing high-quality bespoke e-learning content can be very expensive and time-consuming. For many organisations, it simply isn’t a viable option.” remarks Steven Price, Cylix’s Managing Director. “Our readymade e-learning courses enable organisations to deploy high quality e-learning without paying bespoke development prices. What’s more, they can be quickly re-branded and customised to meet specific requirements, so they look like bespoke courses. That’s a win-win proposition.”

Health & Safety Essentials has been designed to set new standards for online health and safety training. “There’s a lot of health and safety training material out there.” comments Price, “However, most of it is simply aimed at enabling organisations to tick a compliancy checkbox. We wanted to develop a course that was engaging, stimulating and effective – words that aren’t usually associated with health and safety training!”

One feature that’s attracted particular attention is the learning laboratories. These are environments in which learners can explore topics for themselves and learn through discovery. So, for example, in the fire laboratory, learners get the chance to actually use different fire extinguishers on different types of fire and see the results. Once they’ve done this, they then need to pass a test to prove that they’ve retained all the key learning points.

“The learning laboratories demonstrate a key aspect of our learning philosophy: that people learn best through doing, not through being told what to do.” adds Price. “In the past, e-learning has often amounted to nothing more than passive e-page turning. Our new courses prove that it can – and should – be far more than this.”

Health & Safety Essentials will be launched in May 2007 in both online and CD-ROM formats. It will integrate with any SCORM-compliant learning management system, enabling organisations to track its usage.

About Cylix: founded in 2002, Cylix specialises in producing highly interactive and innovative e-learning solutions that improve the performance of people and organisations. The company offers a range of readymade courses on equality and diversity, and health and safety, and can also work with organisations to develop bespoke e-learning solutions.