Choice Hotels Australasia partners with IMC AG

Authoring tool LECTURNITY supports eLearning activities

Saarbrücken/Melbourne, 13 March – Today, IMC AG, an international provider of learning technologies from Germany, announced that Choice Hotels Australasia, one of Australia´s largest franchised hotel and leisure companies, is using IMC´s rapid authoring tool LECTURNITY to train its employees. The award-winning tool is meant to support Choice Hotels´ running eLearning activities. “Where people learn, content is required”, says Frances Smith, National Training Manager at Choice Hotels. “With LECTURNITY we can generate our own individual eLearning content quickly and easily, while reducing the costs and complexity involved”. In the first step, Choice Hotels Australasia is planning to record seminars, conferences and specific training on the job.

Like so many companies in the hotel industry Choice Hotels Australasia is faced with growing customer demands on the one side and seasonal movements i.e. employee turnover on the other side. In order to stay competitive and to meet its own high quality standards, Choice Hotels had to put a lot of time, manpower and energy into the perpetual training of its franchisees and their employees. “These processes were not efficient anymore and we decided we needed to use modern eLearning methods moving forward.  The use of the rapid authoring tool LECTURNITY ensures a constant high standard of training quality”, Smith says.

How LECTURNITY works LECTURNITY productions are based on PowerPoint slides.  The software records simultaneously, slides, images and the speech of the person giving the presentation (in connection with a camera and microphone) including screen activities (so-called “screengrabbing”) and annotations in the slides. LECTURNITY records everything and digitalises it into multimedia eLearning content that can be distributed on CD, as a download, streaming media or video podcast. Smith, who is responsible for the preparation and delivery of training and development initiatives throughout Australia and New Zealand, is convinced of the new tool. “LECTURNITY had the best quality download from PowerPoint, is multi-functional and offered the best price and value for us i.e. ongoing cost product from the short listed software tools. The assistance of IMC and the ease to deal with them was equally decisive. LECTURNITY meets our needs and will benefit our company’s training activities enormously”.

Don't programme, teach! When organisations implement new software and reorganise learning processes, user acceptance is crucial. But such acceptance is only possible if users regard the new tools as a valuable aid to their work. With LECTURNITY trainers can teach as usual and the finished eLearning content is just as easy to pass on as it is to understand for the target group. “Just as if you were explaining something in person”, says Stefanie Klein, Head of Division South East Asia-Pacific at IMC.  “The possible uses of LECTURNITY range from sales training courses to lecture recording and training as well as software training courses and electronic product documentation.”
Born in a university lecture hall LECTURNITY stands for “Lectures turned into eternity”. It is the product of scientific research and was devised at the elite university of Freiburg/Germany at the end of the nineties. At the time the aim was to record lectures without additional effort, but in better quality than simple video recordings. Today, more than 200 organisations, universities and companies rely on LECTURNITY as their lecture recording tool.

About Choice Hotels Australasia:
Choice Hotels Australasia, representing the Econolodge, Comfort, Quality and Clarion brands has more than 275 hotels, inns, suites, resorts and apartments across Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Singapore.
Choice Hotels Australasia is part of Choice Hotels International, with more than 5500 hotels in more than 40 countries.