Press Release / July 4, 2006, Adayana Inc., Minneapolis

Adayana India's Winning Entry in Indo-Danish Collaborative Project

Twenty-three-year-old Ashish Sargar is a mechanic who has never touched a computer. Now his company wants to train him on basic automotive repair skills using computer-based courses. He is apprehensive and worried that his lack of computer skills will render the training meaningless. Not so. With Adayana's context-based training, he and his fellow mechanics are taken through familiarity building sessions. To his delight, Ashish finds that he can learn these basic skills on a computer. In fact, computer-based training allows him to access parts of the learning whenever he is unsure or has forgotten some aspect of automotive servicing.

Insights revealed by such success stories are fertile ground for the Indo-Danish Research Symposium. This is part of a collaborative project initiated by the Danish Government Research Council, involving Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India; Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. The symposium was designed to discuss "Cross-Cultural Issues in HCI (Human Computer Interaction)". Several organizations participated in the event, including Nokia, Honeywell Automation etc.

In recognition of Adayana's experience, break-through insights, and effective application of these insights to real-time learning problems, Adayana India's paper titled "Designing e-Learning that Bridges the Digital Divide" was among those selected to be presented at the Symposium.

The paper incorporates Adayana's experience and the methodologies it adopted in designing a learning product that is sensitive to the culture and contexts in which individuals work, learn, share, think, and behave, thus bridging the digital divide. It also shares insights on how technology-based learning can empower all employees, regardless of position.

The case study detailed in the paper relates to Adayana's ongoing partnership with Tata Motors (India's only fully integrated automobile manufacturer with a portfolio that includes trucks, buses, utility vehicles and passenger cars). Tata Motors' challenge was to upgrade service skills of a workforce that was both geographically dispersed and had virtually no computer skills.

Adayana has been able to successfully support Tata Motors' training needs by using contextual analysis and extensive user testing to create a scalable solution that goes far beyond basic requirements. The training has pleased the learner community as well as stakeholders from Tata Motors.

VK Kapoor, Assistant Manager, Market and Customer Management, Tata Motors, is very satisfied with the way the program is unfolding. He says the mechanics feel e-Learning is the best way to learn. "In fact, they feel it is even better than classroom training. They find it difficult to concentrate for extended durations in classrooms. Here, they are made to interact with the computer at any time. They'd like it if such training were available for the other [products] too."

Adayana Inc. is a Learning Services company headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a strong presence in India through its subsidiary Adayana India. The company provides a wide spectrum of learning services to a focused set of vertical markets- automotive services; food, agriculture and life sciences; defense; and training outsourcing.

The company's range of solutions and services include strategic business alignment consulting, content and course development, instructional design, learning technology development and managed learning services. Adayana applies its domain knowledge to fulfill it's clients needs to determine and close learning-enabled performance gaps. The company uses technology as an underlying enabler to support its' clients information, knowledge and learning needs. For more information, visit www.adayana.com

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