The Law Society of NSW doubles its annual learner engagement target within just two months
The Law Society of NSW is the pre-eminent professional law association representing the interests of more than 29,000 solicitors across New South Wales (NSW), Australia. It has statutory powers, and regulates the practice of law in NSW.
The CHallenge
The Law Society of NSW had more than seven systems to capture information and deliver training, but none kept enough data to thoroughly analyse progress and performance. There was also no way for members to see their training, review their training or see which CPD units they had done and which they had left to do. The previous systems were also not adaptive or responsive, there was no way of delivering e-learning and the quality of data collected was poor and often incorrect. The Law Society of NSW sought to implement a robust, functionally rich learning platform integrated within an e-commerce catalogue and payment gateway to support its business, and decided to work with Totara Partner Androgogic to come up with a solution.
The Solution
Androgogic worked with The Law Society of NSW to create an LMS that would provide a platform for the delivery of course, enable easy site navigation and online communication, provide secure access based on different user roles and capture grade information related to assessments.
Totara Learn was chosen as the LMS to support this project, as it would give The Law Society of NSW the freedom to innovate and create a combined e-commerce and learning platform. Androgogic designed the platform to make full use of Totara Learn’s audience functionality, where audiences of learners were separated at the point of e-commerce and within the CPD tracker. This made the platform more secure, with content and courses split into their relevant areas, and ensured that people only saw the learning content that was aimed at them.
Totara Learn is also an adaptive and responsive LMS, meaning that it could be used by members using any device, bringing the entire platform into the 21st century. The platform was also redesigned to carry the organisation’s brand throughout the entire site for a consistent user experience.
The implementation took around three months, and while it was officially launched in September 2017, the first real trial was in early 2018 during the organisation’s rush period.
Results
The Law Society of NSW set a goal of attracting 4,000 users within a year, but with Androgogic’s Totara Learn solution, they managed to attract 8,000 within two months. This demonstrates that members have embraced the one-stop shop approach of the platform that has been championed as the future model for learning and CPD compliance across the organisation.
The platform was also easy to use - following the platform’s launch, where all internal stakeholders had been briefed on the LMS, only three users out of 1,000 in the first week needed help logging in. Even the CEO commented on how simple and clean the platform looked, with several tester groups of tech-savvy and non-tech-savvy lawyers giving feedback that the LMS was easy to use; particularly the CPD Tracker.
Overall, the introduction of Totara Learn presented a major cultural shift in a traditionally conservative law environment, moving from no single central system, no e-learning, no reliable data and no responsiveness to a single, flexible, cost-effective LMS used by solicitors across New South Wales.