Esri Offers Free Self-Paced E-Learning to Customers

Redlands, California—June 27, 2016—Esri will give all customers that have a qualifying product with a current maintenance subscription unlimited access to free self-paced e-Learning through its new Training website, Esri president Jack Dangermond announced today.

“Esri encourages lifelong learning,” Dangermond said in announcing the complimentary e-Learning at the Esri User Conference (Esri UC) in San Diego, California. “We are happy to offer organizations the opportunity to train more people in their workforce in how to use Esri ArcGIS at no additional cost.”

Because the ArcGIS platform is no longer the exclusive domain of the GIS team in many organizations, it’s important that everyone who uses ArcGIS maps and apps can easily acquire the skills they need to be productive. Unlimited access to self-paced e-Learning will help with this.

Users within each organization will be able to access a wide variety of e-Learning content in one central location on the new website, which will go online this summer. Offerings will include:

• Web courses
• Training seminars
• Esri videos
• Learn ArcGIS lessons
• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• Teacher resources including GeoInquiries and SpatiaLABS

The new Training site will also be redesigned to simplify access to the vast amount of educational resources that Esri teams create on a regular basis. All the content is being professionally curated to make it easy to discover and start learning immediately.

The new site will add features to make learning fun and engaging. At the site’s initial release, users will have personal dashboards to view their learning activity, wish-listed items from the Esri Training Catalog, and progress through sequenced learning plans on focused topics. Modern online learning elements such as gamification (earning points for completing learning activities), digital badges that validate course completion, and collaborative learning through social communities are being evaluated for the future.

Patty McGray, director of customer education for Esri Training Services, said, “We’re not just making a website, we’re building a location for lifelong learning, where our users will be able to explore and have fun as they continually grow their geospatial knowledge and technology skills.”