Continuing education voucher systems : A flexible and targeted statistics programme based on learning objects and blended learning

Learning should be fun as well as inspiring and innovative. What you learn should be directly applicable to your daily work and should help you see things in a new perspective, and your studies should fit into a busy life. Who of us has not tried to return home from a course, putting the briefcase away and shelving the hand-outs, only to forget the knowledge acquired during the excellent course because it was not really applicable to our daily work, and because there is not time during an ordinary working day to put acquired theories into practice.

The world around us changes so fast that life-long learning is a prerequisite for possessing the competencies demanded by the business sector. Today, data analysis is used in practically all areas of society and plays an important role in almost any company. Many employees find it important to be familiar with data analysis and able to apply statistical methods – competencies that will increase the quality of their company and save it considerable expense.

So we need a new type of continuing education that will reflect a rethinking of content, form and duration. In the future, continuing education will be in the form of voucher systems. You may attend the specific chunk of a study programme you require whenever it suits you and pay only for what you get. If continuing education is to be attractive to employees as well as companies, study programmes must meet the following requirements:

• It should be possible to follow a programme in parallel with an ordinary job

• It should be possible to work on study projects at your leisure.

• Knowledge gained from a study programme should be directly applicable to your daily work.

If the providers are to meet these requirements, the task of developing new study courses and tailor these to new students must be manageable. We have therefore proposed a new type of research-based continuing education courses. These courses are structured around ‘learning objects’, i.e. short complete education sessions, which may be combined in various ways according to the students’ interests and levels. We combine them with ‘blended learning’, i.e. a combination of e-learning, web-based learning and face-to-face learning.