Sydney, Australia – Defence Housing Australia (DHA) with B Online Learning have won the PLATINUM LearnX LMS Awards for Best New Technology Implementation – Deployment of a Hosted LMS.
DHA has more than 650 employees throughout Australia with 16 regional offices and four call centres. Prior to 2012 training was decentralised with minimal record keeping. DHA made a decision to create a centralised Learning and Development (L&D) team. Over two years DHA L&D has implemented more than 100 eLearning modules and many workshops and courses, particularly around building leadership capability and compliance. There was a need to be able to manage and track this training. Also their WHS team needed to provide training to more than 3,000 external contractors. This was not possible with the limited LMS DHA had.
Key LMS Awards features DHA were looking for:
- Utility to upload and manage SCORM custom content without vendor assistance
- Capability to manage course registrations for all learning media types
- Ability for staff to enroll in a course
- Registration approval workflow
- Flexible extensive reporting accessible by L&D and managers
- Controlled access
- Integration with the HR system – Aurion
Watch Barry Moore from DHA present at LearnX here.
Barry Moore – Learning and Development Specialist
“We previously managed training through spreadsheets and a basic LMS that could only manage eLearning, but this was limited in its capability. Hours of time and energy was spent producing reports that could not be regarded as accurate. Maintaining records was also very labour intensive. We had two full-time administration staff struggling to keep up with record keeping. Communication and engagement with managers and staff was always initiated by L&D with us having to spend a lot of time explaining what we had to offer and how it all links to staff professional development.
Being a new initiative in DHA our strategy early on was to improve engagement with the business and make training easily available to staff. Being able to customise banners, give it a DHA corporate look and tweak the user interface to make it simple for our staff to use was inline and supportive of our strategy.
For our external contractors we were able to manage the training to more than 3,000 contractors seamlessly. From DHA’s contractor management application, we are able to add contractor organisations into the LMS real time directly from the contractor management application, with no manual input at all. This was vital for contractors when creating their account to validate and to be assigned to these organisations for reporting purposes. After the contractor created their account with a simplified form, they are assigned their compliance training automatically and were able to access this training in the field.
This allowed DHA safety and project officers to check contractors’ compliance on the job. The process of managing this large group of learners involves no manual intervention at all, and is managed in the one instance of the LMS via communities allowing us to provide different business rules than we have for internal employees.
In the future, we will be able to target different types of learning activities based on trades through the LMS. For example any learning content that is based on electricity content, will be targeted to those contractor organisations who are electrical contractors.
It has had an enormous impact on staff and the business. Staff now actively seek out training to improve their skills and knowledge. Managers are more engaged with L&D and the ability to view their staff’s achievement has increased their engagement with L&D. Managers and staff are now referring to the LMS for information when completing development plans as part of the performance development agreement process.
The fact that we could implement and track our compliance played a role in our WHS team gaining national accreditation.
It’s proved very cost effective. We have gone from two full-time administration staff to one. The one administrator not only managers the LMS but now has time to assist with eLearning development, increasing their skill set.
B Online Learning LMS awards us with more capability than we need at our early stage of development as a centralised L&D department. We take comfort in the fact that as we grow and require more capability from our LMS, it can meet those needs.”
