Jedi Jon’s job is to help you grow your business. Jon has a deep understanding of the training market, a passion for technology, deep knowledge of Emerging Technology topics, extensive formal training that has resulted in post-graduate degrees in Education, and years of success in various sales and marketing roles. He’s ready to use those skills to assist you in growing your business, leveraging Emerging Technology training.

Jedi Jon’s role was created in 2020 to help training providers harness the potential of accelerating demand for:

• Data Science Training: From Tableau and Power BI to Python, we’ve seen an explosion of interest in Data Science topics. Jedi Jon has led the evolution of our product offerings and has launched key products, like our Data Analysis and Visualization course, that takes data beyond Excel. 
• General Cybersecurity Behavioral Training: Every organization of every size in every industry needs foundational CyberSAFE behavior training for the general population. These classes are not long and a meaningful event can be conducted in two hours or less. Jon is ready to help you onboard the training or deliver classes for you. These can be done effectively using remote delivery approaches.
• Secure Coder Instruction: Security by Design is a hot topic. The days of creating an app that “just works” are over. Application developers are being held to a higher standard and standards such as PCI-DSS are requiring that application developers take the time to incorporate secure coding principles into the design of their applications. Ask Jon about the CertNexus CSC course and how you can position it to satisfy these types of requirements. 
• IoT, AI, and ML: Data is the new currency. Data is gathered, analyzed, learned from, and used for real-time decision making using the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. Jon can help you put our CertNexus offerings to work including our BIZ level courses that provide the “what you need to know” for business leaders and project managers, practitioner courses that help IT professionals create applications, and secure practitioner courses that teach how to do it securely. 
• VILT: Jedi Jon is a Master MCCT and Master CVE. With the virtual classroom here to stay, instructors must have the skills needed to manage remote learners and virtual classrooms with the same effectiveness as a physical classroom. Jedi Jon can provide those skills through either our public offerings or private classes.   

Contact your Logical Operations Account Manager who can help you leverage Jon’s expertise. Jedi Jon is ready to go, so put him to work!  

As we head into 2021, I want to present all the services I can provide to help you grow your business this year and beyond.   

• Pre-Sales Trainings and Webinars: I am happy to work with your sales staff to help them understand the growing training market around Emerging Technologies. I am also available to run customer-facing webinars on the same topics to help you grow demand with new and existing clients. The objective here is to help you sell more training classes on very high profit and in-demand subjects. 

• Speaking Engagements and Customer-Facing Calls: I have presented at multiple conferences, trade shows, and client events. I can assist you virtually or in person when it comes to acting as a subject matter expert for whatever need you have. Want to nail down a large client?  I can help with that. Have an event? I am eager to work with you and speak at it. I can speak on educational topics and Emerging Technologies. I'm here to help you grow your brand and close deals with your top clients. 

• Helping Your Trainers Get Better at VILT: Since the start of the pandemic, I have helped over 3,500 instructors and teachers obtain their Modern Classroom Certified Trainer (MCCT) certification. This four-hour class helps educators of all levels understand the differences between teaching in a traditional classroom versus a digital classroom, how to keep their classes engaging, and how to make connections with learners to assist with knowledge transfer. If you are going to keep a component of your schedule virtual (and you should), this class can help make sure your students are having as good an experience as they would in a traditional classroom. The objective here is to keep your trainers as flexible as possible, and keep your students satisfied.   

• Teaching Emerging Tech Classes for You: We have found that organizations are looking for training that introduces them to the technology they want to adopt over the next five years. These technologies include, but are not limited to, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Data Science, and IoT. I can help by getting you set up to offer introductory training on these topics, taught remotely by me, at low to no cost to you. The objective here is to help you get your clients interested in new and profitable training on these topics. 

I want to help you grown your business this year. I know that we can help you do that through our world class courseware. Still, if you want to grow by leaps and bounds as we emerge from this pandemic, I am here to help you take it to the next level. Whether it is anything from the list above, custom curriculum design, or any other way in which I can be helpful, I look forward to sharing in all your successes in 2021.  

If you’re teaching a variety of courses from the Logical Operations CHOICE product line, then you’ve encountered Mastery Builders as an optional component of the CHOICE learning model. For example, in our Data Science learning path, you’ll see Mastery Builders in courses ranging from Microsoft® Excel® to SQL Querying.   

But what are Mastery Builders, anyway?  

Simply put, Mastery Builders are student exercises that are associated with a lesson or group of lessons, rather than with individual topics. This means that Mastery Builders align with the overarching functional objective of a lesson, as opposed to the more granular, task-based objective of a specific topic. (Note: here’s a refresher on learning objectives in the CHOICE instructional model.)  

Compared to the topic-level activities within the main body of the curriculum, Mastery Builders might include more challenging hands-on practice, more extensive case study work, or even additional quiz-style questions to promote certification readiness. Mastery Builders are deliberately structured to be somewhat open-ended and not to provide detailed scaffolding for the students’ work. To ensure student success in the Mastery Builders, we provide suggested responses in the Solutions section of the student manual, as well as sample completed files for the practical, hands-on exercises. 

Mastery Builders are considered instructionally optional and are not included in the suggested running times for the lessons. For this reason, they appear at the back of the manual, rather than in line with the lessons they support.  

Now that you know a bit more about the learning theory behind Mastery Builders within CHOICE curriculum, I hope you’ll find lots of ways to use them flexibly, as you see fit: as extra in-class review and practice; as offline work; or as optional self-study for your more advanced students. 

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The Assessment component on CHOICE provides you and your learners with a self-evaluation tool that they can use to check their understanding of the course content. Assessments can include multiple-choice, multiple-response, and true/false items. Our goal is for each item to validate the student’s grasp of a given learning objective in a realistic and intuitive way.   

For a standard CHOICE course, we develop one assessment item for each of the topics in the course; that’s why you’ll see different numbers of items in each course’s Assessment.  For example, our popular “DAVE” course has 19 topics; that means its Assessment will have 19 items.  On the other hand, our two-day Tableau Desktop: Part 1 course has 26 topics; its Assessment will contain 26 items.   

By default, the Assessment is not timed or graded, and students can complete it as many times as they like. You can use it in a variety of ways:  

• As a diagnostic tool prior to class, to help you and your learners understand how to focus the material. 
• As both a pre- and post-class evaluation, so learners can see their progress and growth from the learning experience. 
• In class, as a group discussion tool and conversation starter.  
• As a post-class wrap-up exercise.   
• As an extra offline activity for students to complete at their convenience.
• As a diagnostic tool prior to class, to help you and your learners understand how to focus the material. 
• As both a pre- and post-class evaluation, so learners can see their progress and growth from the learning experience. 

Organizations that have their own branded CHOICE platform can modify the Assessment by adjusting the number of items, adding scoring, and changing how results are reported. These changes can help if you need to offer a more quiz-like experience.  

I hope this has given you some insight into the CHOICE Assessment component, as well as sparked some new ideas for how you can make the most of it in your instructional events.

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Logical Operations revises student and instructor materials based on technical changes, customer feedback, and our own assessment of necessary changes. The revision notes for the most recent updates are below as well as posted on the new Content Revisions page. Use this page as a resource to quickly access and view all revision details for any of our recent course updates. 

Reminder: When viewing a product on the store, check the Revision Information tab to see the summary description of the most recent revision for that product at any time.

As the saying goes, the “cat is out of the bag” when it comes to working and learning remotely. According to Global Workplace Analytics, over 56% of Americans hold a job that is compatible with working remotely. They also believe that by the end of 2021, 30% of the total workforce will be working from home multiple days a week. This is a huge change—certainly a long time coming, but obviously precipitated by the pandemic. 

Remote work will continue in great numbers even as this pandemic ends. This means virtual instructor-led training (VILT) is also going to need to continue, as organizations will diversify the hours and locations of their employees, but still need consistent training for their teams. The answer is going to be virtual options for your clients who are now working remotely, either full time or part time. Simply put, if you want to keep all of the business you had before the pandemic and continue to grow your business through 2021, you will need to prepare to offer classes in a VILT format. 

The good news is that according to the U.S. Department of Education, VILT provides “equal if not better educational outcomes while being an affordable, low-overhead alternative to in-person training.” In addition, Elastic found that their VILT classes would routinely rate higher than the ILT alternatives, due to the change in structure and flexibility that the VILT experience allowed them. This means that you can absolutely have a successful VILT schedule of courses, allowing you to continue working with your current clients, while reaching new clients who might not be in your sphere of traditional influence. 

VILT also allows for flexibility when it comes to hiring and contracting the right trainers. As I have personally experienced while running hundreds of VILT classes during this pandemic, the audience for our training has been individuals we never would have been able to work with in a traditional ILT setting. I have routinely taught international students while never having to leave my work-from-home office. It has truly been amazing to service students across the world with whom I might never have met otherwise. 

The biggest challenge you now face when preparing to keep VILT on your schedule is making sure your instructors are prepared and your classes are designed properly for the VILT experience. The Modern Classroom Certified Trainer (MCCT) certification can help with both of those challenges. This industry-recognized certification program can help prepare any instructor to lead effective and engaging VILT classes and it touches on all the skills necessary for you to have an effective VILT program.   

It is time to look towards the connectedness of the future when it comes to training, and VILT will be the primary delivery method as we move through 2021 and beyond. Are you ready to grow your business? If you are, the MCCT certification is the first step for any of your instructors.

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You already know that CustomCHOICE offers excellent opportunities for you to customize off-the-shelf LO courseware. Did you know that we can help create custom curriculum for your larger clients to give you more opportunities to win those big training contracts? 

Using over 5,700 titles and the combined experience of instructional designers and industry experts with decades of experience, Logical Operations has created custom curriculum for some of our customer’s biggest clients. If your customers are coming to you with extended scopes of work for training programs, you do not need to fill their requests with just off-the-shelf courseware. We can help you mix and match to design a full training program that will exactly meet your customer’s specifications. 

The next time you receive a complicated scope of work for a training class or rollout, Logical Operations will help you get everything you need to bid on and win that big training opportunity. No matter what you need, we have a solution for you.   

Andrea Montanarella
Manager, Custom Production
cprint@logicaloperations.com
1-800-456-4677—Option 4 | Direct: 585-350-7014