The Career Academy delivers online learning across five countries in a range of categories, including accounting and bookkeeping, administration, management, psychology and counselling and pet and animal care.
The Career Academy’s vision is to provide students with an outstanding online learning experience.
The Challenge
The Career Academy needed to move to a platform that allowed one course to be included in multiple programmes without having to create duplicates of that course. They operate in five countries, and each country needed its own version of each programme, but the courses included across the five countries were too generic for most categories.
From a maintenance point of view, it made sense to have one version of the programme rather than five. In addition to the need for one course to be used in multiple programmes, they also needed to be able to enrol students into a collection of programmes and have each individual programme within the collection released to the student on completion of all of the courses in the previous programme.
They also wanted to enhance the online experience for the student and incorporate a range of gamification elements.
The Solution
Totara Learn was recommended to The Career Academy on the basis that they would be able to have one version of a course that would be included in a range of different programmes, and since this was a major deciding factor they decided to make the change, choosing to partner with LearningWorks.
In March 2017, they began migrating content from Moodle to Totara and reimagining how their programs were delivered. Totara has allowed The Career Academy to build country-specific programmes using generic courses, and quality assurance activities are now much easier to complete.
As they migrated the content from one platform to the other, they saw the opportunity to include elements of instructional design that they had not used previously, and the inclusion of these new design elements has taken them from providing a good online experience to an outstanding online experience.
Because they were migrating an entire database of course content, they were able to reimagine everything, and with the many core features as well as the range of plugins available, Totara has allowed The Career Academy to develop an intuitive and innovative learning platform for its students.
“Our students absolutely love the new learning platform! Based on the feedback we have received students find the courses very interactive and engaging, and they really feel supported on their learning journey.” – Daniel Hunt, CEO, The Career Academy
As part of the migration, The Career Academy wanted to incorporate elements of gamification and create a consistent approach for the creation of every course.
They built a ‘master’ version of the course with a range of options that could be included or excluded depending on the course, and they have been able to ensure that every course offered follows the same format, which in turn provides the student with familiarity and encourages then to keep going.
As part of the migration, they have added student discussion forums to all courses, installed Level-up, designed badges that are awarded for passing assessment items and built a range of special badges for tutors to award to individual students.
They have also created every single quiz as a random quiz to allow them to remove outdated questions and add new questions without interrupting the student learning, and have created country-specific dashboards so that they can tailor the messaging and they have recently started using H5P elements within courses to provide risk-free comprehension assessments.
Additionally, they have created four different certificate templates which align with the level of the programme the student completes. Feedback activities at the end of the first course in all programmes, and at completion of the programme, ensures that they capture feedback from the students at the beginning and end of their journey so that any issues can be addressed and positive feedback can be taken as an indicator of the success of an outstanding online learning experience.
The Result
The Career Academy is delighted with its Totara Learn platform by LearningWorks.
They are now able to link one course to multiple programmes, and have designed all enrolments to be processed through audiences, as well as being able to release programmes to students based on the completion of prior programmes.
They have also successfully implemented a wide range of instructional design elements in a consistent manner across all courses, including gamification elements such as Open Badges, Level-up and H5P, which has improved learner engagement.
The use of random quizzes has also reduced issues with quiz maintenance, and they have also improved the quality assurance process by eliminating unnecessary duplication of courses.
“The migration to Totara has taken The Career Academy from a good online experience to an outstanding online learning experience.” – Jessie Nankivell, Global Academic Manager, The Career Academy
Furthermore, The Career Academy is very happy with the service of LearningWorks. At every step of the way, LearningWorks were available to provide advice on particular tools or approaches The Career Academy wanted to implement, and LearningWorks helped them build an LMS that exceeded their expectations.
They also liked that LearningWorks were happy to think outside the box and come up with solutions that suited The Career Academy’s business model, rather than trying to force them into an out-of-the-box solution.
Customer
Connected Partner
Customer
Region
New Zealand
Sectors
Education & Training
Industry Sizes
Large
Solutions
Learn
Connected Partner
