1. your complete e-learning solution
presentation for
Joe Parry, Learning and Development Manager
Chris Davies, Chief Executive Officer
presented by
Simon Duncan, Webanywhere Limited
2. What is Totara?
• Custom Distribution
of Moodle
• Open Source
• Enterprise Level
Learning
Management
Platform
4. Benefits to Management
• Easy to manage learning
and development system
• Hierarchies
• Competencies
• Content Management
5. Benefits to Management (cont)
• Comprehensive monitoring
and reporting system
• Assessment
• Compliance
• Reporting
6. Benefits to Employees
• Learning Development
Plan
• Personalised learning
• Scheduling
• Learning records
7. Benefits to Employees (cont)
• Social Learning
• Engaging user experience
• Gaining and contributing
• Help and support
8. Benefits to Employees (cont)
• Job Satisfaction
• Increased competency
• Greater sense of worth
• Increased motivation
9. Benefits to Company
• Asset development
• Flexible and future proof
• Scalable
• Cost effective workforce
development plan
• Improved efficiency of
current training programmes
10. Benefits to Company (cont)
• More engaged workforce
• Staff loyalty up
• Staff turnover down
• Increased revenue
• Reduced costs
• Improved service
11. Summary
Totara LMS will enable you to create and manage
learning plans, which allow management and all
employees to develop the specific competencies
needed to improve performance and prepare
for new responsibilities.
This will help your company to grow and develop as
your workforce does the same.
Webanywhere will help you to achieve this and
support you every step of the way.
12. Thank you
For further information please contact
Simon Duncan
01535 358 177
simon.duncan@webanywhere.co.uk
It’s time to Stretch Beyond
Editor's Notes
I have developed the presentation around a more real life scenario of presenting to a company that Webanywhere may want to do business with. It helps to make it more real and relevant. I’ve chosen HSS Hire as the company to present to. I’ve spoken with Joe Parry – the Learning and Development Manager at HSS who has been able to give me a bit of an overview of the set up at HSS, and I’d like to share this with you before we start. HSS have a network of supercentres and regional hubs around UK and Ireland which support the 200 HSS Hire shops. They have a number of services including HSS One Call, HSS Training and HSS Sales. They have a very basic e-learning set up just for aspects of Health and Safety which includes modules for fire wardens and manual handling. They do have an extensive training section which focusses on classroom training and they deliver an average of 3 ½ days training per year for each of their 2,200 staff. The system that they have for managing this is basic and manual. They are looking into e-learning.Today’s presentation will focus on the benefits to HSS of implementing Totara LMS as your complete e-learning solution.
Totara LMS is a custom distribution of Moodle, built to enable corporate organizations to quickly deploy an enterprise level learning management platform.It is open source and has been tailored for the specific needs of enterprise training, CPD and talent management.A combination of an off the shelf package and a bespoke package with all the benefits of both. A framework which you can do pretty much anything with, quickly, easily and at low cost, to provide you with the perfect e-learning management solution for your company.As an enterprise level solution it displays, manipulates and stores large amounts of data. It is scalable, robust and it integrates seamlessly with your current business software.
I will focus on how the use of Totara within HSS will benefit these three key areas.Your management, your staff and the company itself, all of which have different needs, though many of these cross over between roles. As managers we need to work with, oversee and support our teams in various ways. We also need to monitor and report on the work that is being carried out, the individuals within our teams and our teams as a whole. Anything that can help us to do this is beneficial.With regards to employees I am referring to all the staff within HSS including managers as we all have our own learning and development plans, and our own needs both individually and as part of a team.I place a focus on the people that make up HSS, as they are the company’s greatest asset. It is, after all, the people that make HSS what it is. Whether that is the person answering the phone in the central ordering team, the manager of a hire centre or one of your Heroes of Hire, meeting your business objectives is dependent on the knowledge, skills, experience and the application of your workforce.The more you can improve your workforce (the company’s greatest asset), the more you improve the efficiency, the effectiveness and the worth of your company.
When you set up Totara for your company you will be setting up an easy to manage learning and development system, the application of which is straightforward, and starts with the setting up of hierarchies. Hierarchies in Totara allow you to set up various frameworks that best represent the structure of your organisation. This enables you to input the structures and relationships of job positions and different sections of your organisation. Learning can then be mapped to individual job roles, management levels, departments, teams and groups.Once you have your hierarchy set up you can develop competencies and courses which link into the hierarchy and which can be delivered to individuals, teams, departments and levels or positions. Let’s take Health and Safety as an example. A crucial area within HSS. There will be the standard H&S competencies which apply to all staff, company wide. Once set up, these competencies are fed automatically into every individual’s learning plan. Then there will be the competencies which are specific to the H&S department, in the same way that other competencies will be relevant for other departments only such as IT, Human Resources or to the Hire Centres. As an example, you require everyone at your Hire Centres to be competent in manual handling, and so those competencies around manual handling are automatically assigned to the learning plans of all Hire Centre staff as part of a manual handling course. Now some competencies eg for those relating to team leader, may also be relevant to all team leaders across the company. That’s OK. You assign these competencies to all staff at the level of Team Leader. You can assign the same competencies to individuals, to departments and to positions, and manage the whole framework quickly and easily. Brilliant.Of course for there to be competencies and courses there needs to be content. Totara has a wide range of content authoring and management capabilities allowing you to create a course with both content and activities. You can insert almost any kind of web content into your courses and there is a huge range of learning activities - e.g. lessons, wikis, forums and assignments. As well as creating your own content, you can add SCORM courseware or custom courseware – the choice is yours.HSS already has some e-learning courses, as well as extensive classroom courses. That’s OK – you can pull these into Totara too. Unlike other LMS products, you don’t have to ask your vendor to add new content, you are free to add as much courseware as you like, by yourself.
The other key management benefit that I would like to focus on is the ability to monitor and report on every aspect of learning and development. As managers we need to know what is happening for individuals, teams, departments or the whole company, so that we can ensure that objectives are being met and that everyone is getting the support they need. Totara has a range of assessment options including a sophisticated assessment engine where you can create assessments from banks of questions, and track scores and completion rates. You can create multiple question banks for use within a topic, a course, or for site-wide use. You can then generate assessments using one or more question banks, with randomisation if you wish. You can even import external assessments created using authoring tools such as Quizmaker. With regards to compliance HSS work in safety-critical environments where compliance is a primary issue both legally and for personal safety. So the ability to determine compliance criteria and maintain a clear and accurate audit trail is essential. Totara takes the headache out of keeping up with this. Records and evidence are there for every activity and for every individual, ready for you to draw on and always up to date. In this way you can quickly check individuals, teams and departments to ensure that you have the required numbers of compliant staff for any given area, for example, you can check that every Regional Centre have at least 2 employees qualified to advise on and maintain plant, or that every HSS location has at least 2 up to date first aiders. And then we have the reporting, which is outstanding. Never again will you need to sift through paper reports or even copy and paste from multiple spreadsheets. Totara will do it all for you quickly and easily. You can manage and report on compliance and assessments. In fact you can report on just about any element of the entire e-learning system. It’s easy, it’s fast and it’s efficient.
So now let’s look at some of the benefits to employees. I include in this all the management as well, as every member of staff will have their own learning development plan, from a new trainee to senior management. So let’s look at the Learning Development Plan first of all.One of the marvellous aspects of Totara is the ability for staff to manage their own learning development plan. As a manager, you will have worked with each team member to a greater or lesser extent to set up individual learning plans for your team based on their job roles and competencies, which provides quick and targeted access to relevant learning. I say to a greater or lesser extent as individuals can set up their own plans with the team leader reviewing and approving as required. So employees can then take part in the management and development of their own plans, setting their personal learning objectives, viewing their record of learning and monitoring their progress. If they want to move from the control ordering team into HSS Onecall, they can see what is required and develop a learning plan accordingly for approval by their manager.They can also schedule their learning and book themselves onto, or request to be booked onto, courses, and they can manage their own calendar, and decide when and where to carry our their learning. This scheduling can be very helpful and allows employees to make the best use of their time. A good proportion of their learning will be on the job and I’ll look at that element in a moment. Some of it will probably be allocated training time, however it can equally be carried out on the train or at a hotel, thereby helping them to make the best use of what would otherwise be down time.Of course a part of having access to their learning plan is having access to their learning records. Employees can keep abreast of how they are getting on with regards to achieving their goals, and their learning records serve the purpose of managing their CPD for them, and can be presented as evidence when going through a review or looking at promotion or change within the company.
Over the last few years online collaboration has become an essential part of many people’s lives. With most of the UK population on Facebook, and nearly everyone of working age taking part in some form of online collaboration, it has become the norm. People like to engage with others online. Totara brings this key element into the learning environment.Employees enjoy a rich and engaging user experience with collaborative and social learning through the likes of wikis, blogs, forums, blended learning (blending online and offline activity), individual and collaborative assignments, quizzes, tests, discussions and much more.It also gives learners the opportunity to gain from, and contribute to, the body of knowledge that is built up over a period of time, through the development of user generated content on forums, wikis and blogs. The long term benefit of this to future employees is, of course, phenomenal as you build up this tremendous body of knowledge, experience and discussions – all of which is searchable.In addition there is greater access to help and support as learners benefit from user messaging and the ability to comment on learning plans and the elements that make them up.
Before I look at the company benefits I would like to touch on the less tangible benefits that employees can experience.As William Cobbett, 19th Century politician, writer and reformist stated, “Competence is the foundation of happiness.” Now whether you agree with him or not, there is no doubt that the more competent we are and the better we do our job, the greater job satisfaction we gain. With competencies being the building blocks of Totara, it helps learners to do their jobs better, and from that to develop a greater sense of self worth – a commodity which can turn an individual from pessimist to optimist, from someone who just turns up, to a worthwhile employee who makes things happen.Add to that the increased motivation that comes from doing a job well and you have a positive cycle of learning, achievement and job satisfaction.
So we’ve looked at some of the benefits to the management and to learners, and now I’d like to focus on the benefits to the company as a whole.People are the company’s greatest asset. Employees are the biggest cost and the greatest management challenge. A good learning development system can go a long way towards improving this asset and smoothing the management challenges, and an important part of this is aligning employee development with organisational strategies. We will help you to do that as a part of the consultancy element of working with you. Getting this right is helped enormously by how flexible and future proof Totara is.And as it is scalable it can also grow as you do. Because there are no per-user licence fees and the initial fees are low (up to 80% more cost-effective than other corporate e-learning systems) and it is available on an annual subscription basis which provides ongoing support and enhancements, the cost effectiveness actually increases as you grow. And as you can increase the efficiency of the current HSS training programmes as well, the cost benefits start to become very apparent.
And so our end result isWe have a more engaged workforce who have a higher level of competency, can do more, better and more efficiently and they have a higher level of job satisfaction. Management are better informed, they can access all the information they need quickly and easily, and are able to provide the help and support that their teams require. As a result,Staff loyalty increases as employees learn and engage more and Staff turnover decreases. Just this in itself is a huge bonus as the cost in time, money and lost expertise that goes to replacing staff is phenomenal.Ultimately of course, the real benefit gets measured byIncreased revenueReduced costsandImproved serviceThrough implementing Totara with Webanywhere, you can achieve all three.
In summaryTotara LMS will enable you to create and manage learning plans, which allow management and all employees to develop the specific competencies needed to improve performance and prepare for new responsibilities. This will help your company to grow and develop as your workforce does the same.Webanywhere will help you to achieve this and support you every step of the way.
