Advancing Adult Learning
PowerU, Inc. (PowerU) is a joint venture between Icarus Studios, a platform provider for massively multiplayer online games, virtual worlds, and e-learning products, and American Research Institute (ARI), a long-established leader in role-based, results-oriented education and training services. The new company has absorbed all the assets and personnel of ARI and will continue to serve ARI customers.
PowerU continues the ARI legacy of being a leading provider of education and training services, allowing customers to achieve maximum effectiveness through high-quality, educationally sound, and mission-critical training. PowerU offers a wide range of services, from designing custom training solutions to full outsourcing of training operations. The company specializes in assisting clients by designing creative training solutions using the latest instructional design technology and delivery infrastructure.
Organizations worldwide are challenged with upgrading the skills of their workforce to adapt to changing markets, economic conditions, changing technologies, and changing global competition.
To meet this need, PowerU takes a leading role in revolutionizing adult learning by providing three-dimensional immersive (“3DI”) learning environments to these organizations to dramatically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their workforce development.
PowerU has combined world-class instructional techniques and tools with a sophisticated state-of-the-art virtual world engine to provide clients with an easy path to the learning environment of the future.
Background
For over fifteen years, the PowerU management team served as senior managers within the largest IT training companies in the world. Under their direction, these organizations successfully developed hundreds of technical courses that required not only rapid development, but also frequent changes due to the volatile nature of information technology. Our management team has real world experience with using course authoring tools, collaboration platforms, remote lab infrastructures, Learning Management Systems (LMS) integration to create training programs using a mix of delivery methodologies. One of the goals in founding ARI in 2002, and PowerU in 2008, was to bring this experience and expertise in courseware creation and training services from the IT training industry into other commercial and government sectors requiring rapid development, cost effectiveness and results-driven learning.
PowerU has taken this “training as a business” mentality and used it to create continuously improved management processes and tools to better meet the training needs of our clients.
Philosophy
Flex-Sourcing
PowerU offers our tools and services in any combination of ways to fit your needs. You can:
- Buy only what you need
- Mix and match best-of-class solutions
- Quickly and easily adapt to change
- Integrate with what you have
By using open standards as well as open source, PowerU provides:
- Transparency - You can see and access all the information you need (versus having it locked in a proprietary format).
- Flexibility - You can easily change how the system works, or extend its capabilities, because the standards are open and available. You don't need to depend on us for changes.
- Integration--- Easily interface with other systems that use open standards.
Best-of-Class Components
Our offering structure allows us to swap out parts for newer, better solutions as they become available, making sure you have the best components available for your training needs and are not locked into a sub-standard application because it “comes with” a monolithic training solution.
Link Training to Measurable Business Results
All considerations of what to teach and how to teach it are made with the desired business result in mind. We ask: What skills does a particular person need to contribute to the success of the organization?