E-learning

E-learning saves time, and provides quality and flexibility for drivers and companies

An interview with Pavel Greiner, chief executive and owner of Autoškola KING (KING Driving School) and the KING e-Learning portal.

What is the most frequent mistake that beginner drivers make on our roads, and how much is it down to the actual way they were taught?

I don't believe that the mistakes are totally caused by the driving schools, if the drivers are provided with good quality teaching and have good lecturers who don't teach first-time drivers to perform dangerous maneuvers on the road or to drive fast. I think that mistakes by newbies are caused primarily by their lack of experience and they often overrate their skills in today's hectic traffic. This often applies to younger drivers and mainly men. Women don't take so many risks on the streets because they are more responsible. Other drivers are also a problem because some of them are not very considerate to beginners.

The best kind of prevention is for driving schools to be diligent and for road rules and safe driving to be taught right from primary school, which these days unfortunately is not taught thoroughly enough.

Your company has been providing a wide range of training services to individual drivers and professional drivers since 2007. Can you specify the scope of your range in more detail?

We really try to offer comprehensive services. Of course, we provide the classic lessons for all licence types, and we do so in Czech and in English, including teaching materials, because we have many drivers who are foreigners learning to drive with us. We also offer training for professional drivers and driving examiners, which other services are linked to.

As examples, we also offer professional driver's licences, training of hazardous load transportation and working with fork-lift trucks, and general Safety at Work and First Aid training and the related psychological examinations. Last but not least, we collaborate with government institutions on possibilities for re-qualification for unemployed people.

Besides this we also record instructional videos, 80% of which we have translated into English, and we share them on our facebook page, which currently has the most user views in its field, for which we are grateful.

There is therefore a really wide range and our aim is to provide all of the necessary services conveniently accessible at one point.

You do training in attendance format and online format. Who is the e-learning portal that you run suitable for and what are its benefits?

This service is ideal particularly for training driving examiners because professionals have to undergo training in person, and it was created based on my experience in attendance course teaching at various companies, which often don't manage to quickly organise quality attendance training for a certain number of people. It is also the result of an assessment of the existing range of e-learning education, which is often, not always but often, based primarily on test questions, as is driving licence training, and in my opinion that is not sufficient.

The greatest benefits of our e-learning are time saving, speed and flexibility, along with simplicity and quality, because besides testing, e-learning also provides information in a very comprehensive and visually attractive interactive graphical format. Other benefits are efficiency and convenience because the company enters its data only once, the program stores the data, and subsequently works with them – it notifies of upcoming dates and times for re-training, changes in legislation, and anything new going on.

Besides this, customers can use our non-stop hotline free of charge, on which they can ask for advice at any time. E-learning education is also available in both Czech and English.

If I need to have driving examiners trained, what can I select from the online course and what are the topics that are trained?

From experience I have noticed that a person is able to maintain maximum focus on learning for about 45-60 minutes. We have, therefore, tried to set up the course so that it really grabs the attention of the driver being trained right from the first e-learning page and provides him with substantial information.

So we start straight off with the rights and obligations of the employee and the employer. For example, if an employee is sent out from point A to point B, what happens if she drives to point C and has a car accident there and so on. It's actually often the case that employees are sent out far away from the company office, they do what they want there, and the subsequent costs for the company increase at a fast rate.

Drivers will also find out what to do in the event of an automotive accident, how it relates to safety at work – behaviour, breaks during travel, spacing on the road etc. Of course there is also first aid training. We offer various items of interest, for example how drinking alcohol affects driving, along with other things.

This e-learning also includes an educational video that we recorded on how to deal with automotive accidents. A driver has everything he needs to do his work in one place in a clear and very easy to understand interactive graphical format.

You also provide a first aid course as part of the online Safety at work and fire safety training. I can't imagine though how saving a human life can be studied without practical exercise. How do you reflect that need?

You shouldn't perceive e-learning as the only source of information. We endeavour to provide a truly comprehensive approach, and particularly in the mentioned case of first aid you can only cover the information necessary for saving a person's life with great difficulty if you're only using a computer. For this reason, you can contact us at any time and we will be able to arrange the necessary first aid training for people who are interested also in person with a nurse who is able to also offer her own perspective on the information in print.

To summarise, what should convince a person to decide to complete a training course with you, no matter whether it's in person or online?

For the price that the customer pays we offer truly high quality, comprehensive training with a considerate approach, and I guarantee that.

I am proud of our team of instructors, who are a great group of people, and I think that their enthusiasm and friendly approach are also reflected in the quality of the teaching and in the satisfaction of our customers. Both male and female instructors teach here. Besides that, we have a quality fleet of vehicles with air conditioning and the option of choosing a manual or automatic car, and professional facilities, including the classrooms in general.

We don't expect our customers to pay anything extra. We would like them to leave with the feeling that they have been looked after well and in a friendly way and that they have the option of attaining all of the necessary information or licences that they came to us for or that they need for their careers.

I believe that everyone can choose the conditions they want here so that the whole process is pleasant and so that they feel comfortable with us.

Do you plan on expanding your e-learning services or anything else in the future?

We are currently preparing our website in Russian in order to accommodate our Russian-speaking clientele, and in general there's always something going on here. We are recording new videos, which have so far had excellent viewer numbers, we communicate with the public via facebook, and of course we plan on continuing to improve our e-learning services too.