The Challenge
Tennis Australia needed to have an enterprise-level LMS which supported the blended delivery of a wide variety of coaching and professional learning programmes to varying internal and external target groups. One of their guiding principles is 'access to learning anywhere, anytime'; a particular focus for remote and regional environments.
The ability to create dashboards specific to expanding audience requirements (coaches, schools, officials, clubs) provided economies of scale and flexibility within the development environment.
The ability to customise CMS design offered an optimal blend of an attractive and responsive graphical user interface; functionality more accustomed in the higher education or corporate environments.
Critical to timely courseware and resource development was an intuitive system that was easy to learn and navigate, catering to their casual and transient courseware developers and learning facilitators. From a content perspective, the organisation also needed the system to be flexible enough to allow the design and development of media-rich courses, including the integration of third-party video modules.
Additionally, having a system which offered optimal smart and automated scheduling, including calendar integrations and a user-friendly learner portal was critical to our success.
The Solution
The solution was ‘Bounce’, the professional learning platform built using Totara LMS to serve stakeholders including coaches, schools, universities and officials.
Drawn to the ease by which courses could be created and implemented in any format, including SCORM objects, the team was quickly empowered to develop their various coaching programmes for different target audiences and organise these using the ‘program management feature’ within the LMS.
Androgogic, their Totara Partner for this implementation, also assisted with the integration of a third-party video content service, a vital visual learning element of the programme.
The team also made extensive use of the many automated features of ‘learning administration’ readily built into Totara LMS. Even the iCal-enabled Calendar helps to reduce the amount of correspondence as participants can automatically update their own Calendars for bookings.
A key success factor of the platform transfer and LMS development was the close working partnership with Androgogic. This included the detailed project scoping and system specification gathering process, first-class project management and on-time implementation, the exceptional information architecture planning process and a clear understanding and prioritisation of system functionality related to current requirements and their future capacity and vision.
In addition to this, Androgogic offered system training and professional learning for key internal staff, and an extensive first-line service and support for Tennis Australia’s technical implementation team.
“World-class expertise. Professional approach. Elegant solution. Seamless development and implementation. Simply put – peace of mind.” – Andrea Buckeridge, Coach Development Manager at Tennis Australia.
Tennis Australia also liked the plugin approach to developments. Additional features and functionality were delivered through plugins, ensuring they stayed as close to the core code as possible to ensure that the LMS could be easily maintained in the future. For instance, the third-party video library and lightbox gallery were delivered using plugins.
The Results
With a small team based in Melbourne, Tennis Australia has been able to fulfil their key goals in the following areas:
- Blended learning environments that support face-to-face workshops and courses
- Support for teachers and university students in their professional environments
- Significant cost savings over proprietary LMS alternatives including:
- Lower per-user fee as well as capacity for growth
- No longer dependant on third-party proprietary courseware developers – both in the development as well as the revision re: branding and sponsorship changes
- Ongoing maintenance and upgrades much more straightforward, equating to a lower total cost of ownership. Better user fees and capacity to add new users (scalability)
- Full administrative control of CMS and LMS
- Streamlined login process with email
- Third-party video library plugin that has increased views and provides users with the ability to easily download and use with Tennis Australia Technique app
Androgogic also received an award for Tennis Australia's Bounce platform, being awarded a silver LearnX award in the category 'Best New Technology Implementation - Deployment of a Hosted LMS'.