ALISON, a free online learning website, has seen its registration numbers soar to the 150,000 mark in the UK alone - 500,000 world wide. ALISON provides courses in subjects as diverse as IT Literacy, English Language, Financial Literacy, Math, Health and Business Skills. As well as free online training, ALISON offers free certification and group management tools to libraries. These high quality interactive courses can help library users nationwide in their personal development and in enhancing their job prospects.
Southampton Central Library has been using ALISON as part of its IT Literacy development tool-set. According to Alison Connolly, Learning Centre Manager Southampton Central Library, all of their “ALISON learners agree that it is a really useful tool in helping to learn the basics of using a computer for pleasure, or to help with everyday life regardless of previous IT experience”. Southampton Central Library has noted how their ALISON users are so keen to learn and up skill themselves and find the resource extremely useful for progressing to more advanced courses.
ALISON believe that by that by taking the opporunity to study for free on ALISON, whole communities, not just individuals, can improve their economic and social prospects.
For Certification, ALISON uses a highly innovative approach of Flash-Testing, where anyone, anywhere, can be challenged to take a five minute test to validate their certification attainment via ALISON. In this way, both training and testing are provided free of charge. ALISON is a social enterprise and sustains itself on advertising, premium charges and content development fees. It relies on ALISON learners and trainers (including librarians!), to spread the work about its free learning resources worldwide.
ALISON has a mission to enable anyone, anywhere to educate themselves for free via interactive multimedia on any subject online.
ALISON stands for Advance Learning Interactive Systems Online. For the full list of new courses, go to the website http://alison.com/course/
