The concept is a relatively simple one: using drag-and-drop functionality, the tool allows companies to choose what content is used in their courses and what is left out. The "playlist" creation works in much the same way as most popular music players and so is already familiar to the majority of users.

Toby Roberts, Managing Director of Safety Media, opined, "Health-and-safety training is not a topic that should be decided by algorithms that pre-test knowledge. It is possible for people to guess the correct fire extinguisher to use on an electrical fire during a theoretical pre-test, but this does not prove that the learner will make the same decision if faced with an actual emergency."

Roberts goes on to add, "In order to ensure the correct information is passed on, courses have to include material chosen by a qualified and responsible person who knows what is required for the individual requirements of the organisation and the environments therein."

It is for this reason that Safety Media have broken up their course library into individual subjects, allowing the right people to select the course content that needs to be included. Whether these courses are delivered as micro learning or as three-hour, all-encompassing training sessions, the decision is up to the company, not the eLearning provider.

The material is offered in a variety of workplace environments ensuring the context, as well as the content, is relevant to the individual learners.

In order to prove comprehension of the material, all courses include a self-test and individual risk assessment that refers only to the relevant material included in the course.

Where appropriate, all of Safety Media's standard courses come with ROSPA approval, which demonstrates high levels of quality and subject relevance of the material included in the course.

Although courses created using Course Creator will not be eligible to carry the RoSPA approval seal, the fact that the material is the same provides administrators with reassurance that they are providing top-quality training to their employees.

Upon reviewing the new tool, Alan Bellinger of the Learning and Performance Institute commented, "Generic courseware always suffers from the lack of agility, and whilst personalisation puts a veneer on generic courseware, it doesn't really address the core problem - and now you can! "Any colour, as long as it's black" can now become a legacy proposition.

He also observed, "Seeing as the courses need to be created, the new tool may add a delay in time to value. However, it increases that value considerably."

The new proposition from Safety Media is designed to change the way off the shelf is delivered, with a hope that the old perceptions of it being "boring", "the same", and "irrelevant" will become a thing of the past.