Esri Academy: Discover new e-Learning tools for GIS professionals
If you haven’t visited the Esri Training website recently to browse the e-Learning resources, take a few minutes and re-discover it. Fantastic new features that make it even easier to maximize your annual software maintenance investment through e-Learning, and a new name: Esri Academy. Same website, just better!
The newly revamped Esri Academy offers a variety of courses – online self-paced, instructor-led in-class and instructor-led online courses – and updated, easier methods to discover what you are looking for. While the online self-paced items are open to all who qualify, instructor-led courses are only offered to US customers. More on that later but essentially, Esri Canada offers many of the same great courses for Canadian customers.
With this new look and feel, you can now find what you would like to learn by choosing from a list of nine main topics. These categories help organize more than 500 training items, which are a collection of web courses, training seminars, videos, massive open online courses (MOOCs) and additional resources such as white papers, conference presentations, tutorials and teacher resources, all available at no extra cost with a qualifying software product on maintenance. These resources are a great complement to Esri Canada’s instructor-led courses and can serve as quick reference guides if you are in the middle of a project!
Head over to Esri Academy to watch a video, join a live seminar, take all kinds of e-Learning courses, interact with thousands of other learners around the world in a MOOC, and download white papers to stay up to date with the latest ArcGIS capabilities.
In addition to the catalogue enhancements, users can now leverage learning plans for themselves and their teams.
Interested in learning more? Join me on a quick tour of the Esri Academy and check out some of the brand-new features.
First stop on the tour: The Catalogue
The catalogue groups training courses by topics and focus areas, making it easier to navigate through the 500-plus resources.
The new design allows you to search for e-Learning through high-level GIS topics and drill down to more focused, relevant items. You can filter through hundreds of e-Learning resources at a more manageable level. Also, if you are interested in a learning item but not quite ready to enroll, simply hit the ♥ button and add it to your wish list. You can also add an item to a Learning Plan by clicking on the + symbol.
Examples of items from the Esri Academy catalogue
While you are looking around, please note that all instructor-led courses ($USD) offered for registration on Esri.com are available to US customers only. In Canada, Esri Canada offers almost all of the same instructor-led courses available on Esri Academy, and some additional ones, directly on our website. Check out our Canadian, course catalogue, course schedule, registration information and more in the Training Solutions section.
Second stop on the tour: Learning Plans
As the range of learning resources continues to expand, it opens new and diverse learning paths. It also means that users can prioritize and manage their progress at their own pace. Esri Academy offers editable learning plans with new options: choose an Esri-developed plan, pick a plan developed and shared by someone else in the ArcGIS community, or create your own that reflects your learning pace and professional goals. With these flexible learning solutions, it’s easy to include a training plan in your annual career development learning objectives.
Since learning plans can be shared privately, published publicly or assigned to other users, coordinators and managers can assign a learning plan to a specific user(s) or group; and, track their progress by looking at the start date, last activity and completion date, as well as the percentage of completion of the entire plan. This feature can help managers during the onboarding of new employees, bring all team members to the same skill set level or get their team geared up for the next project.
The Esri Academy offers users personalized Learning Plan dashboards.
Last stop on the tour: My Academy
Who doesn’t like a personal dashboard! In this new tab you will find your personal dashboard including an overview of the things you did or added to your wish list. Please note that any instructor-led course, scheduled or taken with Esri Canada, won’t appear on this dashboard.
In the Learning Activity section, you can see your personal activity for each item you started. You can download the content again or resume the course, finish watching a video, or archive some of the items you don’t need anymore.
In the Schedule section, you will have a list of the events you registered for, with a set date. You can also enable the reminder alert feature, if you wish.
In the Learning Plans section, you can create a new training plan, edit items within a plan, copy it to create a separate one, assign it to others, share it publicly with the community and delete or archive one or more plans to keep your personal space clear of unwanted items.
Features included in the My Academy Dashboard.
Let’s expand on assigning learning plans and tracking progress for other users.
This new capability allows organizations in Canada to leverage the option to assign Learning Plans to a user or group of users. For some organizations, this means that hundreds of users can now have their skills development plan managed in groups. Team leads, supervisors, coordinators, managers and directors can create or choose an existing learning plan, tailored to their employee’s role and learning abilities, get it “HR approved” and include it in annual plans for longer-term skill development budgets.
I hope you enjoyed the tour and that you’ll take advantage of these valuable new features meant to help enhance professional skills, grow your organization’s GIS to a new level, provide visibility to stakeholders, engage with your citizens, make better-informed decisions, and more.
If you would like some help getting your team started with the e-learning resources on Esri Academy, let us know at training@esri.ca or leave us a comment below.