Editors note: Nancy Goodyear, a 27 year veteran of SAS, manages our self-paced e-Learning product development. We are thrilled that Nancy has agreed to share her knowledge and unique experience as a blogger on The SAS Training Post. Today we'll introduce Nancy and the e-Learning program with these seven questions. If you have additional questions for Nancy, or want to share how e-Learning has helped you, feel free to leave a comment!

1. Nancy, what is e-Learning and tell us what makes it so popular.

e-learning courses are asynchronous. That is, they are self-paced and available 24/7 as opposed to Live Web that is synchronous and has a specific start and end date/time.  Most of our self-paced e-learning courses cover the same material as the corresponding instructor-based courses.  The material is presented with engaging audio/visual movies.  The courses include demos that show students how to perform tasks in the SAS environment,  interactive questions and quizzes that are interspersed throughout the training, and practices that enable students to practice with data in their own SAS environment (data is provided in the course).  In situations where it is not feasible for students to practice in their own environment, the courses provide an interactive simulated SAS environment where they can practice. We get a variety of comments on why our students love the courses, but I think two of the biggest reasons are that they are both engaging and convenient. People are so busy these days and e-Learning allows them to fit the training into their schedule.

We provide two means of licensing e-courses:

• Individual license—students have unlimited access for one year; accessed from our SAS web site.
• Multi-user licenses—SAS Education Sales Reps work with customer sites to determine price, access terms, etc.  This option provides customers with downloadable versions of courses so they can install on their own servers and/or Learning Management Systems (LMSs).

2. Last year was a big year for both customers and SAS employees using e-Learning.

Yes, it really was! I'll let the numbers speak for themselves.

*number of site licenses that each include numerous students—up to 1,500 at one site

 3. We hear that SAS Certification training is really popular through e-Learning.

Yes, our e-learning courses have been extremely popular as a way to prepare for the Certification exams.  We have SAS Certification training bundles and preparation courses for three SAS Certification exams:  SAS Certified Base Programmer for SAS 9, SAS Certified Advanced Programmer for SAS 9, and SAS Certified Predictive Modeler Using SAS Enterprise Miner.   The e-learning preparation courses cover all of the material included in the corresponding Certification exam.  Certification bundles are available at a discount and include the relevant e-learning courses, an online practice exam, and an Exam voucher.  The courses include data and guided practices that enable you to practice your new skills.  If you do not have access to SAS software, you can also license a learning version of SAS for use with the training, called SAS OnDemand for Professionals.

 4. Tell us more about SAS OnDemand for Professionals. It sounds like a perfect solution for people who need access to SAS software.

SAS OnDemand for Professionals is SAS learning software that provides students with immediate access to a SAS session and practice data from specific SAS training courses.  This learning version of SAS provides all of the features of SAS software but it is not intended for commercial use; only practice data supplied by SAS can be used.  All of the e-learning courses that teach SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS programming can be used with SAS OnDemand for Professionals.   This immediate access to SAS via SAS servers enables students who only have access to SAS at work or who do not have access to SAS at all, to practice when and where they want. This short video shows how easy it is to use SAS OnDemand for Professionals with an e-Course.

5. SAS e-Learning has won prestigious awards!

Yes! SAS e-learning has won numerous awards over the years, including the coveted Brandon Hall Award of Fame award; Best in Show, Carolina Chapter of the Society for Technical Communications (two years in a row);  and Distinguished in the International Online Competition, Society for Technical Communications.

6. What new courses have you recently added to your lineup?

Our newest courses include:

Statistics 1:  Introduction to ANOVA, Regression, and Logistic Regression
SAS Enterprise Guide:  ANOVA, Regression, and Logistic Regression
Applied Analytics Using SAS Enterprise Miner 7.1  (an updated version of a course we have had for awhile)
Rapid Predictive Modeling for the Business Analyst

For those who are interested, here's a list of some of our most popular courses:

SAS Programming 1:  Essentials
SAS Programming 2:  Data Manipulation Techniques
SAS Enterprise Guide 1:  Querying and Reporting
Applied Analytics Using SAS Enterprise Miner

7. What's next? New courses in the works? New and/or updated software?

We are working on making our courses available on iPad and Android tablets by the end of the year.  We will also be adding new features that are now in some of our courses but not all, such as the ability to print a text version of the course and the ability to perform a full-text search within the course.

We will be updating our current courses to work with new versions of the software such as JMP 10 and EG 5.1, and developing new courses, including:

SAS Enterprise Guide 2:  Advanced Tasks and Querying (5.1)
JMP Software:  ANOVA and Regression (JMP 10)
Predictive Modeling Using Logistic Regression

If you've never experienced e-Learning for yourself, check out our demo of the SAS Programming 1 e-course.