Judus Floratos first felt the pull of teaching and training as a college student at California State University in Bakersfield. Through programs sponsored by his church, as well as the university, he tutored and mentored high school youth. That work touched something inside him as he discovered that he "enjoyed helping other students understand and learn."
Although his last name is actually Greek, Floratos grew up in a Mexican American household in southern California — a childhood he describes as idyllic. He credits his culture for his strong sense of family and a desire to provide a "strong sense of home, of security and stability" for his three sons. The boys are home-schooled by Floratos's wife, a former Montessori teacher. As a result, "I think about learning and education at work and at home as we try to find the best tools to help our sons learn," he says.
As e-learning multimedia developer for athletic gear behemoth Nike, Floratos thinks about learning and culture a lot. The courses he develops to train Nike employees on SAP reach 5000 people in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Japan. "Culture is an important concept but something that can be easily lost in e-learning," he says. Although much of e-learning's effectiveness depends on bandwidth and the audience's acceptance of e-learning, Floratos researches such issues as color schemes, photography versus animation, navigation, and the use of slang and idiom for his projects and makes certain to test them on a representative sample. He ensures that English is clear or translated accurately into the native language of the learners....