The Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games organising committee needed a lot of custom content to support their workforce of over 50,000 employees, contractors and volunteers. Ideally, this would be created in-house, meaning they needed an efficient, easy-to-use authoring tool to produce lots of eLearning content in a short period of time.

imc Express is an easy-to-use authoring tool that takes the hassle out of content creation. Learning teams can easily import text from Microsoft Word, add multimedia content, drag-and-drop images and build interactive learning activities to build engaging learning experiences. To support the most inclusive Commonwealth Games ever, video content is automatically subtitled, ensuring it’s accessible to the entire workforce.

On top of this, imc Express offers a range of pre-made and customisable design templates, along with didactic templates to help authors convey their content in a didactically meaningful way. Content is adaptive and responsive for all devices, ensuring it’s suitable for the Commonwealth Games’ large, diverse audience who may be accessing training from desktop computers, tablets or smartphones.

This custom eLearning content will supplement the in-person training which takes place within the Commonwealth Games venues in Birmingham, ensuring volunteers can make the most of their face-to-face time. The modules created in imc Express will help volunteers know what to expect before their in-person training, giving them a useful overview of their roles and the tasks they can expect to perform.

Over 50 courses were created, in-house, in no time. Many static documents and plain text resources were transformed into engaging, interactive eLearning. This was made significantly easier by the fact that with imc Express, a single plain text input can be converted into multiple outputs, such as SCORM, web content or ebooks. This content was then imported directly from imc Express into the Learning Magagement System (LMS), reducing manual content upload.

Providing this content as soon as volunteers have their roles, ensures that they can start to prepare for the games immediately without having to wait for their face-to-face training. They will have access to photos, videos, maps and more created with imc Express by leaders in their functional area, ensuring they can turn up for their face-to-face sessions with a foundation of knowledge.

This primarily self-created approach will also allow the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games team to accommodate inevitable last-minute requests for learning content, as they can all be quickly created in-house using templates and the imc Express tool’s artificial intelligence to pull together accessible, attractive and engaging learning resources for thousands of volunteers, contractors and paid employees.

Following Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games’ public procurement process, imc’s proposed solution clearly came out on top. This was, in part, thanks to imc’s experience with other sporting organisations, such as Australia’s National Rugby League, along with their on-budget and on-brief solution.

The project kickoff took place in November 2021, with the initial go-live planned for late February 2022 - a very tight timeframe for such a large-scale, complex LMS project, so efficient working practices were a must.

An inclusive learning platform

A key consideration for this project was that the Birmingham 2022 games will be the most inclusive Commonwealth Games to date, with more medals for women and a bigger para-sport programme than ever before. Birmingham is also a very diverse city in the UK’s West Midlands. This need for inclusion had to be reflected in the choice of learning platform. The LMS needed to be simple, accessible and suitable for use by a wide range of learners.

Building an LMS within time limitations

Additionally, it was vital that this programme remained within the planned scope. With such limited time, it was not an option to stray outside the initial plans, so the Commonwealth Games organising committee and imc agreed very early on that this LMS needed a very clear focus with no room for scope creep.

There are thousands of people involved in the Commonwealth Games, all of whom have different learning needs and roles to prepare for, across 43 functional areas and 279 different volunteer roles. The data transferred from Rosterfy to the LMS flags the type of user and automatically gives them access to the relevant training within the course catalogue.

This data also tells the LMS which functional area the learner works in, so they are also automatically enrolled into role-appropriate courses. This removes a huge amount of manual work for the organising committee, and ensures that the user management process is streamlined and efficient,

For training measures that must be carried out due to legal or internal company compliance requirements, there is often a fixed timeframe for successful completion. If such deadlines are not met, this can lead to the employees not being able to perform tasks due to a lack of professional qualifications or not being entitled to perform them due to legal requirements.

To support the successful completion of such training measures, employees are not only informed about the status of their mandatory measures, but are explicitly requested to complete them within the defined period. In the compliance environment, the term “chasing“ has become established for this task. Compliance officers can not only easily create compliance training courses in the Learning Suite user interface, they can also assign validated content to users of predefined target groups.

With just a few clicks, graphically appealing and meaningful reports on compliance status can be activated. In addition to the monitoring and chasing options available via the user interface, the notification module of the imc Learning Suite can be used to define the time intervals at which the distribution groups are to be informed by email about the compliance status of employees.

An important part of this project would be the huge learner audience, of 35,000 contractors, 14,000 volunteers and 2,000 paid employees. Additionally, this would be a very diverse audience, comprising different ages and levels of technical ability, meaning the LMS needed to be extremely accessible and user friendly.

With so many volunteers and contractors, Birmingham 2022 needed to ensure that their event scheduling platform, Rosterfy, would communicate with their LMS. This ability to transfer data from Rosterfy to the LMS would save Birmingham 2022 a lot of time that would otherwise be spent on manual data entry.

Finally, the LMS would need to support multiple different user groups over the course of the contract, along with different branding and content, so the chosen LMS needed multitenancy functionality.

For digital learning transformation to have a real impact across the organisation, L&D managers need to first ensure buy-in from their fellow leaders, starting from the top:

You will have done a level of planning in order to win the support of department heads. In order to maintain that support, you’ll need to carefully scope and cost the technologies you’re looking to introduce and the human resources needed for their implementation.

What existing processes will be retired and what are the direct replacements for each one in the new digital learning environment?

As so many technology projects stray beyond expected timescales, give yourself plenty of buffer time so that you don’t miss deadlines and start losing support from your peers.

Communication is vital for a successful digital learning transformation programme. Many IT projects fail not through a poor choice of technology, but through lack of communication beforehand in order to generate understanding and buy-in from end-users.

At the consultation stage, learn about what the key pain-points are within each department and try to tailor your digital learning solutions to help ease them.

Help each department to understand the benefits of digital learning transformation for their roles and you’ll find less friction and greater user adoption of new systems and processes post-implementation.

Don’t try to implement every project within the digital transformation programme in one spectacular hit. There will be disruption - good and bad - so limit the bad and overall shock to the organisation by rolling out to a limited cohort - perhaps the department where you have greatest buy-in first.

Introduce new tech and eLearning content gradually, replacing previous training methods bit by bit. Look for what systems and content people are finding confusing and what really enthuses them.

As your early-stage digital learning projects bed in, analyse the data that comes back from your learning platform. What are the key metrics you are looking to improve and how does the new solution fare compared to previous methods?

Again, communication is essential to making your digital learning programme maintain its early momentum. You’re gathering quantitative data, but don’t ignore qualitative feedback from each group of learners and their managers.

What has been annoying? What hasn’t worked? What could be improved?

Within each individual roll-out project, mistakes will be made - that’s normal. Those mistakes will be forgiven if you listen to the feedback, take notes, and act as quickly as possible to address them with tweaks to your roll-out.

Compliance teams are often under pressure to do their jobs while staying out of the way as much as possible in order to allow employees to get on with their day to day responsibilities, such as customer service, operational work or revenue generation.

A digital learning platform gives L&D and compliance teams access to useful data so that trends can be seen in where an individual might need additional support for certain aspects of training or where a certain course is causing strange delays or roadblocks.

Such data can enable personalised learner interventions rather than bombarding a whole department with additional training that only a few people need to stay compliant. It also allows Compliance or L&D teams to improve training content that causes bottlenecks for a whole cohort of learners.

The whole point of the Compliance function is to allow an organisation to run fluently while staying on the right side of the law or industry regulator.

Through access to data generated by digital learning systems, a Compliance manager is empowered to better manage risk across the company. An effective digital transformation programme integrates every department and a great deal of their training.

Without acting like a ‘Big Brother’ presence in the company, the Compliance team can look into the development of processes and related training, offering guidance and risk mitigation processes along the way.

eLearning is now a common way for organisations to deliver training and your employees are likely to have used it in some capacity - even if it’s just during their education or a company onboarding process.

It has now evolved into a standard way of making training content available any time and anywhere, enabled by ubiquitous internet access by mobile or WiFi, and by websites or learning platforms making it accessible on phones and tablets, as well as a desktop computer.

During and post-pandemic, eLearning will be the only way for training to happen at all for many organisations.

So as there are now fewer barriers to delivering eLearning and it has become so important, here are key steps for making it effective:

Arguably, this is the most important part of an eLearning project, because if done well, it gets everyone on board to help you and gives you the reasoning and structure for every subsequent stage.

• Why this project? What are you looking to achieve? If you have eLearning in place already, what improvements are you looking for, and if you don’t - what do you want this project to bring?
• Is eLearning suitable? Usually, the answer is yes - as knowledge-based content allows learners to consume it at the time, place and pace that suits them. However, for some manual / skills-based roles, it may not be the case, so could traditional, face to face training or a mix - blended learning - be the best choice?
• Cost-benefit analysis - what might this project cost and what are the expected business benefits in terms of cost-saving, efficiency or revenue generation?
• What do your learners want and need? Listen to their views on knowledge and skills gaps, and where there is an agreement, look at a bottom-up approach to complement top-down from L&D and HR management. If learners feel that they have contributed to the process, they are much more likely to engage when the eLearning is ready.

However small your L&D team, delivering an elearning project should always be a collaborative project and involve multiple professionals.

The same person may perform more than one, but rarely all of the roles below, so the L&D manager will need to resource at least the following:

Again, planning this stage in advance is key. Does your project need to run within a specific timescale or a particularly tight budget? Both these factors will affect the nature of the eLearning that is feasible.

What mode of delivery is most suitable for the nature of your training and your group of learners? Text and images might work well for purely informational content and knowledge retention, whereas training the ability to adapt to on-the-job situations like customer service may lend itself to scenario-based training and something more interactive.

Close collaboration between the subject matter expert and the instructional designer will allow for the content to be delivered in the best possible way while adhering to any technical constraints.

The instructional designer then needs to work closely with the eLearning developer to bring the content to life, ensuring that it works well on any device that may be used and that it is accessible for any type of current or future learner.

An important point here is that quality assurance (QA) is not a task to be done only by the developer as a final step. Good QA is done independently by someone external to the design and build process, as those people may have become too close to see all the potential real-life issues.

Ideally, the project managers, SMEs, and end-user managers and even selected learners will all have the opportunity to offer feedback on eLearning before it is signed off and rolled out.

Most technology-related projects that fail do so not because of an issue with the product, but with the communication and implementation process.

New systems often turn up as yet another piece of work - something else to think about and squeeze in around the existing workload.

If there was adequate consultation at all levels during stage 1, the implementation of eLearning should arrive not as a surprise and even as a welcome addition, because the benefits to learners and managers will have been communicated and expected.

Rather than having to convince employees to engage with your new eLearning, the focus can be on guiding learners and managers in how to make it work well for them.

So clearly, there are numerous benefits to making training available to your customers, but how to make this easy and cost-effective? That’s where a customer education platform can make things efficient and highly scalable.

Extended Enterprise is a term coined by Chrysler in the 1990s to describe the collaboration between a company and its supply chain to gain competitive advantage. Since then, it has broadened to encompass a company’s entire network of collaborative relationships from suppliers to logistics, retail partners and end-users or customers.

Paying attention to the entire extended enterprise (sometimes referred to as the ‘Value Chain’) allows managers to see opportunities to improve efficiency, elevate sales and maximise profits.

The concept can be applied to any 3rd parties who can directly influence the success of a business. So, by fostering more collaboration at all levels outside your own company, potential partners can be leveraged beyond them just performing their main role (i.e. doing the bare minimum).

Here are 5 ways to increase channel sales performance that can be adopted by any marketing or business development manager with a network of partners:

As many organisations have come to realise the competitive advantage that comes with making professional and career development a benefit when it comes to employee recruitment and retention, the idea of a ‘learning culture’ has emerged.

In comes the LXP (Learning Experience Platform), which puts the individual learner in control of their training and development, allowing them to explore content at their own pace and direction.

So in a nutshell, the LMS delivers training in a top-down or ‘push’ manner, while the LXP is bottom-up or ‘pull’ learning. The LMS is used to deliver essential training so that the employee is capable of fulfilling their role and in adherence to any legal or regulatory compliance matters. The LXP in contrast is about giving learners the tools and content that will allow them to develop knowledge and expertise based on self-motivation.