5 October, 2011 – The gap between traditional maritime familiarization techniques and the increasingly sophisticated knowledge required of today’s mariner is growing. Although modern learning management systems (LMSs) are employed by most of the world’s large organizations to increase training effectiveness, reduce training costs and facilitate continuous improvement, the existing LMSs do not adapt well to the maritime training environment. Therefore their use in maritime familiarization training is almost non existent. Marine Learning Systems has addressed this gap by creating the first LMS purpose-built for marine industry training – MarineLMS. MarineLMS has been created by an LMS pioneer who in 1995, as a university researcher, created the world’s first commercially successful LMS for higher education. His resulting company grew to serve 14 million learners in 80 countries. MarineLMS has been three years in development and is now the supporting technology for the “SEA” familiarization program at BC Ferries, the largest ferry operator in North America.
MarineLMS provides all the benefits of a modern learning management systems to the marine industry. It understands concepts such as vessels, routes, ports, etc – and assembles custom learning modules and exams based on the combination of the vessel, route, etc chosen. It makes all critical learning activities available on-line or on paper for instances where Internet connectivity is not available. It also provides maritime-specific learning functionality such as passage planning – allowing the learner to view and “visually navigate” the passage at any scale. MarineLMS also places a great deal of focus on providing learning and assessment metrics and analytics in order to enable oversight and continuous improvement of the learning process.
Murray Goldberg, the founder of Marine Learning Systems, was a tenured Computer Science faculty member at UBC researching technology in learning when, in 1995, he developed the world’s first commercially successful LMS for higher education. He left the university to launch and lead the company which grew to 350 employees serving 14 million learners at 4,000 organizations in 80 countries. Murray is widely acknowledged as one of a small number of key pioneers in the field of Learning Management Systems and has won a number of national awards for his pioneering work in eLearning including the $100,000 Manning Award for Innovation as the country’s top innovator in 2004.
Marine Learning Systems’ first customer was British Columbia Ferry services – the largest ferry operator in North America. MarineLMS has been employed at BC Ferries to train and assess hundreds of deckhands, watch-keeping officers, and terminal operators. It’s use is being expanded to include all positions in the deck, engineering, terminal and catering departments.
According to Jeff Joyce, the director of operational training at BC Ferries,
“MarineLMS is proving to be a game-changer in terms of our learning culture – students are excited about the training, trainers are feeling well-supported, and supervisors have much greater confidence in the graduates…win-win-win!”
And according to Sam Manson, trainer at BC Ferries,
“Standardization is the greatest advantage of the program as now all candidates receive the same high quality training and a fair assessment. Finally the operational training department has moved into the future.”
Marine Learning Systems has expanded operations and is now making MarineLMS available to ferry, shipping, cruise and other maritime organizations around the world.
Marine Learning Systems is an eLearning software and services provider to the maritime industry. Its main product, MarineLMS, was crafted specifically for the maritime training environment to deliver, support and provide metrics on the training initiatives of vessel operators and other maritime training providers. MarineLMS is an enterprise product which operates with or without internet connectivity and inherently understands maritime concepts such as vessels and routes to deliver targeted position- vessel- and equipment-specific training and assessment. Marine Learning Systems also provides a full complement of services to support you from idea, all the way through to ongoing operations and maintenance.
Press Contact:
Jeannie Tse
Marine Learning Systems
jeannie@marinels.com
+1(885) 362-7463
