Designing a better way to deliver online learning
Making learning easier, quicker and more effective for our diverse and very busy staff.
We’ve spent the last few months redesigning our online workplace learning content and platform. The task wasn’t simply to ‘lift and shift’ the existing content, but to design a new approach to how people learn online. The move to a new platform was a great opportunity to change the way staff can learn and develop at their own pace and in a way that suited them.
What needed to change
Addaction is a large organisation with over 1,500 staff working in lots of different geographies and contexts. We have nurses, doctors, pharmacists and people with lived experience among our staff. The majority of our workforce are in frontline roles. Many others work remotely. This makes face-to-face learning and development difficult to both attend and deliver. But staff need to have the skills and knowledge to carry out their roles. By making our online learning more user-friendly, accessible and effective, employees can take more control of their own training and development.
People don’t all learn in the same way — workplace learning should be engaging and flexible enough to take account of all types of different learning styles.
The existing content was often difficult to read and understand, and contained terminology and jargon that was not widely understood by everyone in the organisation. We also wanted to explore and test if all staff needed to know everything about a subject matter, regardless of whether it was relevant to their job. For example, do finance staff at head office need to know how to administer Naloxone? Do all staff need to know who the Caldicott Guardian is? It was important that we established a baseline of what people needed to know, and at what stage.
We wanted to make the content more streamlined and targeted for staff, and structured around their needs, not what we as an organisation wanted to tell them.
How we did it
We needed to get the project up and running quickly because some modules — like safeguarding and information governance — are mandatory and it’s crucial we keep them up-to-date.
We used content designers to work on the project. Content design is about communicating information in the best way possible. It’s about making it simple to understand, easy to find and useful to use. We wanted to start using the new platform as soon as possible so we could troubleshoot and test the new content with staff.
The content team started by working with subject matter experts and learning leads to identify what mandatory information staff needed. And more importantly, what information they needed to carry out their jobs effectively and safely.
We also worked closely with the new learning platform team to make sure it was as easy as possible for people to use. We wanted to make sure the information was grouped in a logical way that aided learning, and helped people move through each section seamlessly.
Challenges
Changing the way an organisation does anything can be a challenge. Up to now, online learning has been written by experts in the subject matter.
Shifting from showing and sharing expertise to being a more user-centred organisation can take some getting used to. Introducing new processes and ways of working to achieve new outcomes can take time. We’ve cut out a significant amount of information and made the learning modules as simple as possible to understand. Losing some of the complexity around specialist subjects can sometimes feel like we’re ‘dumbing down’ — but even busy experts need to complete tasks like workplace learning quickly and easily. If staff need more detailed information we’ve clearly signposted them to where they can find it, outside the learning platform.
Impact so far
We tested the new content and platform with staff and the feedback so far has been positive. Since we launched the new learning platform in June we’ve had feedback from 2554 users and the average rating for the new content is 4.1 out of 5. Staff said that the content is clear and quick to work through.
We will carry on making improvements based on this continual feedback loop, and measure staff progress through the system. We are adding more modules to the new platform and we’ll continue to work closely with our subject expert colleagues to produce a user-friendly, targeted experience for all staff.
