Simon Houlding VP Professional Development at InfoMine Inc May 2nd

Simon Houlding I joined InfoMine about 12 years ago to start the Educational division within InfoMine. Andy and I went to university together many years ago, so we have known each other for a long time. And we came up with this idea of affordable effective education for the mining community around the world, and I joined InfoMine to put together a platform to deliver this education... and then to gather courses, authors, presenters who could help us put the information together. Some core mining courses, some of them are more environmental courses, acid rock drainage prediction, that sort of thing. We've got some professors at UBC to help us to put together some core mining courses : underground mining methods Those courses are still with us, still doing well. We update them every now and then, bring them up to date. Now we are talking exclusively about online courses here. This online was a requirement for us because we wanted to deliver to people around the world. Literally we have about six thousand people now taking courses and they are in Tanzania, Argentina, Mongolia, Kazakhstan... literally all over the world. Mining industry is quite conservative, it's difficult to get new ideas through and it's taken us twelve years to really make a success out of this. That's one of them. Another would be coming up with a format for our courses that minimizes the bandwidth and could be delivered effectively in areas where internet connections are not good. The most popular course by far is our Mining 101 course. There are many people out there... a lot of them not in mining but who need to know about mining and Mining 101 gives them an introduction Aside from that, most of our core mining courses are quite popular, whether we are talking about mine costing or mine management or mining methods, mine maintenance, mineral processing, these sorts of things. The core courses. The idea of delivering education to people around the world, helping to educate people, really appeals to us. And it's been extremely satisfying specially to think that we've got six thousand people out there taking our courses. That's part of it. The other part of it is getting over the hurdle of conservatism in the mining industry. It's taken us a long time to get things going and we had to persevere, but it's paid off really well. About four years ago we started doing more in the way of classroom courses and we graduated from those to webcasts, using a webcast format for our courses. This is a synchronous format where people can ask questions, etc. We are running one today on mine water solutions. We have about 40 people in there, again, from all over the world. They can ask questions, it's quite interactive. And we see this webcast format, integrated with online elearning, that's the way of the future. You need both. People need to be able to do a lot of their own learning at their own pace, in their own environment, and then they get the interactive component through a webcast.