Family Planning users can now browse, enroll, pay for and access courses online with Totara

Family Planning is New Zealand’s largest provider of sexual and reproductive health services. They are also a specialist provider of clinical training for nurses, midwives and doctors. Also, their health promotion teams offer courses for teachers and support staff, guidance counsellors, school nurses, carers and social workers.

The Challenge

Family Planning previously used a training management system to manage their professional development learners; however, they wanted to be able to offer online learning to fit the changing needs of their current and future learners. This change would ensure their programs fit with their strategic framework of utilizing technology to provide equity, access and choice to learners.

Family Planning also wanted to redefine some of their processes, such as invoicing and payment issues.

Lastly, Family Planning needed a payment portal that included various payment methods to act as a gateway to the learning management system’s (LMS) content.

The Solution

Catalyst has advanced Family Planning’s enrollment, payment and learning systems through the tailoring, streamlining and improving workflows and processes — all with the learning management system (LMS) Totara Learn.

Bringing Family Planning’s course content online has improved accessibility for learners under time pressure and based in rural areas.

Family Planning’s website experiences a high volume of traffic, so it was imperative for the course catalogue and content to be easy to find and access through the website. By customizing the Totara theme with Family Planning’s branding and embedding the course catalog on their ‘Course’ web page – transferring the learner from website to LMS is seamless.

After selecting a course, learners are presented with the course details and then progress to enroll and pay. Once enrolled, learners can now view their upcoming, in-progress and completed training on their dashboards – keeping them on-track and organized.

The Results

Catalyst has advanced Family Planning’s workflow and administration work by providing efficient online reports and processes surrounding the management of applicants and payment.

Catalyst configured Family Planning’s Totara to include a payment portal. After learners complete the enrolment form, they choose a payment – Funded, Invoice Request or PayPal – improving the application process for learners as well as streamlining multiple processes for Family Planning staff as information directly feeds into relevant reports and dashboards that are accessible to both the finance and administration teams.

The new procedures have improved clarity and efficiency across teams. Additionally, Catalyst customised the ‘Workshop Attendees’ report to include payment method – this helps administrators track the number of funded places – (for courses where learners are from an identified provider working with high needs clients). Alongside this, a waiting list report was developed so that, if course capacity is reached, the applicant’s details will be added to an ‘Interested Users’ report. Making these types of data easy to collate and assess helps with internal reports and future planning.