Simon Houlding VP Professional Development at InfoMine Inc May 2nd
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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.