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 The Otter Group's e-learning model is distinguished by its
emphasis on:

• The best
  courses and teachers.
  The content underlying Otter's courses and programs comes from the
  world's top research universities and corporations. Rather than focus
  on commodity courses that most e-learning programs currently
  offer—like
  introduction to finance, accounting or marketing—the Otter
  group
  develops challenging courses featuring faculty members, research, and
  resources that are not widely available.

• Valuable new knowledge from applied
  theory.
  The research-based theories of our courses are applied to the real
  business problems that your students face in their work. The results?
  Wholly new ways of thinking about strategy and practice. This fresh
  knowledge is of enormous value not only to Otter students, but to their
  organizations, the professors who teach these ideas, and to the
  institutions that sponsor the research.

• Highly engaged learning
  communities.
  The best education relies on the easy exchange of vital ideas; put
  another way, learning is fundamentally social. This holds doubly true
  online, so ensuring an environment that encourages communication among
  students and between students and professors is a critical element in
  any successful e-learning experience. Our course designs reflect that
  philosophy by steering clear of static, one-way programs and actively
  tapping into and building learning communities of sophisticated
  professionals.

• High
  levels of interactivity and scalability.
  To facilitate the exchange of vital ideas, e-learning programs demand
  higher than average student-to-teacher ratios, yet a major benefit of
  online education is that a single professor's course can be made
  available to thousands of learners at once. Our solution to this
  dilemma? The
  Learning Director.

• Learning Directors.
  These school alumni or corporate managers, recruited and trained by
  Otter, are experts in how a course's subject matter is most relevant to
  a select group of students. The Learning Directors' perspectives makes
  them ideal facilitators, and they ensure that students feel connected
  to the professor, the material and one another by highlighting student
  comments and prodding quiet participants for ideas. We like to think of
  them as the Avon Ladies of the Knowledge Economy.

• Personalization.
  One of the great advantages of the Web is that it allows information to
  be organized and presented for each individual's needs. Indeed,
  personalization is an area where the power of databases can rival
  offerings in the physical classroom. Otter's education model is built
  on our ability to capture deep profiles of students and use them to
  create personal, unique learning experiences.

• A suitable technology
  platform.
  The technology platform that the Otter Group prefers for our e-learning
  programs should support collaboration and knowledge-sharing among
  a community and place social interaction
  and collaboration at the center not only of its design, but also of its
  operating philosophy. We have developed programs on SloanSpace (built
  on the Ars Digita Community Education System), as well as on
  LiveMeeting (formerly PlaceWare) and Blackboard. Currently we have been
  achieving great results with programs that employ blog networks.

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Because weblog networks are at the heart of our approach to building
e-learning programs and online communities, we have built our home page
on a weblog or blog.  This gives us and you several advantages
over plain, old home pages:

Our site is easily updated. 
We like to think of blogs as extreme do-it-yourself web sites. 
Behind this page is a powerful content management system that allows us
to add new content to our home page with the same skills needed to surf
the web.  Our business is growing rapidly so we want to be able to
keep our site current at all times.  With blogs, this is as easy
as cut-and-paste.

You can subscribe to this site.  
You can either receive email notifications or an rss syndication
feed.  By clicking on the subscribe link in the upper right hand
corner, you will get a menu of options for email notifications. 
You can subscribe to all of our posts.  Or you can choose certain
categories for email notification.  

You can also get an RSS feed of this site (and/or its
categories).  RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.”  It
notifies you when a weblog has been updated.  You can find the RSS
feed for a particular weblog site by looking for the orange xml button
(top left of this blog) or the syndicate this site link.  

We like to think of using RSS as going on an email diet.  Instead
of getting emails, new posts to the weblog show up in your RSS reader,
where they can be filtered, indexed, and searched.  And they have
persistence.

To use RSS, you need a newsreader or aggregator.  Aggregators can
be stand alone, embedded as a portlet within a portal, or integrated
into your email.  For information about newsreaders, link to: http://faq.pingotter.com

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