Headspace increases learner engagement by 458% with Totara Learn

headspace use Totara Learn to engage their geographically displaced workforce in learning and peer-to-peer collaboration.

headspace is the National Youth Mental Health Foundation providing early intervention mental health services to 12-25 year olds, along with assistance in promoting young peoples’ wellbeing. headspace delivers services through headspace centres, eheadspace, an online and telephone service and school support which works with school communities to prepare for, respond to and recover from suicide.

Young people primarily access support via headspace centres located across metropolitan, regional and rural areas of Australia. This allows young people to access health workers – whether it’s a GP, psychologist, social worker, alcohol and drug worker, counsellor, vocational worker or youth worker.

The headspace centres are commissioned by Primary Health Networks and run by local organisations across Australia. The role of the headspace National Office is to define the headspace model of care and support the centres to deliver it. Education and Training is a key function that supports this role.

The Challenge

The challenge for headspace was to support their dispersed workforce and build their capability to deliver services in line with their evidence-based model. They aimed to meet this challenge by providing an online platform that supported delivery of training to the workforce, and interaction between workers.

Their existing LMS was limited in its capacity to meet this challenge. Limitations included:

• poor usability,
• poor catalogue search functionality
• no social functionality
• poor device flexibility (static screen size and no tablet or phone access)
• a system delay between enrolment and access to a course leading to a 70% drop off between enrolment and course completion.

The Solution 

headspace needed to completely refresh their approach to their LMS. The workforce were not engaged in the current system; it was not user-friendly and headspace didn’t have the ability to configure the design or user interface. headspace decided to implement Totara Learn alongside Kineo’s social wave extensions including a ‘social’ newsfeed and course ratings, comments and recommendations, to encourage engagement with learning and through peer-to-peer collaboration.

A new efficient registration process allows the system to auto-determine learning paths based on roles, included both recommended and required training. The user-experience was greatly improved, enabling headspace workers to access learning more quickly and with a more streamlined enrolment process.

A catalogue of learning with a sophisticated search function and filter system was also implemented to encourage workers to seek learning opportunities that were relevant to their role within headspace, and to the components of the headspace evidence-based model.

The new LMS implementation includes the following:

• A responsive design theme – allowing users to access the LMS from their choice of device
• A refreshed user interface incorporating the new ‘headspace learning’ brand, keeping in line with the overall headspacebrand
• Reporting dashboards for centre managers – sophisticated reporting that measures and monitors individual or group progress
• Reducing time in the administration of the system through the development of course templates and planning repeated events
• The ability to support blended learning programmes
• Virtual classroom and teleconference plugins to enable live learning and single sign on
• A newsfeed publishing learners course completions, ratings and comments.

Key Features

• Multi-Device
• Social Learning
• Customised searchable catalogue

The Results 

Since the launch of the LMS in February 2017, headspace have seen a 458% increase in the number of course completions over the same period in 2016 (Feb-March). In addition, over 492 of the headspace workforce have already enrolled in headspace learning.

Learner comments about the new LMS include:

“Thanks very much to everyone at Workforce Education and Training, it looks brilliant and will be super useful”. – Marie O’Dea, Manager, headspace Cairns

“headspace Learning is a big step forward for our offering to the headspace centres network. We’ve already fully addressed our user requirements at launch and now look forward to using the flexible Totara platform to continue to improve this offering to the headspace centres.” – Ian MacLean, Manager Education and Training