Below we’ve outlined 3 major changes to our platform and would love to hear your thoughts.
1. We’ve introduced a Free skills assessment
How do you know what you should be studying if you don’t know where your weaknesses are?
We’ve created a diagnostic tool called Skills Radar and made it free for anyone to use so that you can work out what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at.
It’s made up of around 70 questions and takes 20-30 minutes to complete. The first half of the questions establish how confident you are about numeracy and literacy and the second half assesses your ability. When you’re finished you can view your results (you’d be surprised – you probably know more than you think!), we can then recommend courses based on your ability.
You will find the skills radar under the “Activities” tab after you’ve logged in to Learn@Sea.
If you don’t yet have a Learn@Sea account you can sign up for free by clicking here.
2. Maritime Monday
Distance learning is really challenging. Admiral Nelson wasn’t even born when we first started improving education for seafarers so we know through centuries of experience how difficult it can be to improve your skills and work towards qualifications while at sea. Long working hours, long periods away from home, and a lack of proper learning facilities on board all stack up.
You’re not alone out there! To help you on your journey we are putting together a weekly email bulletin to keep you up to date with the latest news from Marine Society College, study tips, resources, books, and updates on our upcoming courses. We also want to hear from you and share your experiences. When you hit a milestone in your studies we will share your success, or when things aren’t going so well we will do our best to help.
Whether you’re on a fishing boat out of Grimsby, a warship out of Vancouver, or a tanker out of Tokyo we want you to be part of our seafaring community.
3. We’ve moved to a subscription service
Different people learn at different speeds, at different times, and in different ways. Because of this, we’ve worked really hard over the last 3 years to make our courses available over lots of platforms. It’s now possible to start a course at home on your laptop, go to sea, and pick up from where you left off seamlessly on your smartphone or tablet through one of our apps, you don’t even need to be connected to the internet! We’re always looking for ways to make the learning experience better; cost is a big part of that so we’ve moved to a subscription service to access our courses:
Learn@Sea Single course access
– Access to one of our four award winning courses, Maths@Sea, Maths@Sea+, Writing@Sea, or English@Sea
– Just £1.99 / month
Learn@Sea Unlimited course access
– Access to all of our award winning courses, plus priority access to our new courses.
– Just £4.99 / month
All of our subscriptions are completely flexible, you can access a course for just one month or as long as you like, and can be cancelled anytime.
We didn’t think it was fair to make you pay for a year’s access to a course that you can complete in less time. Equally, we didn’t want to restrict how long you could access a course if you need more time to work through it or wanted it as an ongoing support tool. Before Christmas, we introduced English@Sea and are now working with more and more international seafarers who can’t necessarily afford to pay the prices we were previously charging. Offering Learn@Sea as a subscription makes getting access to the courses much less costly for individual seafarers and gives you the flexibility to study at your own pace.
That’s it for now – but we want to be constantly improving our offering to learners, so if you have any feedback, ideas, or questions either comment below or get in touch with us.