As evidenced by its status as a four star authority and winner of the LGC’s prestigious Council of the Year award, Kirklees Council has worked hard to become a learning organisation. E-learning strategy was a core component of the success.
E-learning is now a mainstay element of the blended learning programmes offered by the council but this wasn’t always the case, as Kirklees’ Chris Allan explains.
When we first started with e-learning six years ago we had two major problems. The first was senior manager’s buy in, or the lack of it, and the second was the end user’s, which wasn’t so positive either.
At that time senior managers weren’t keen to listen to anything about e-learning, maybe because of the ‘e’ which was put at the front of everything to make it look new and exciting. This didn’t wash with our senior managers so we looked again and decided to take the blended learning approach. Once we did that and talked about the benefits and efficiencies that could be gained, they started to listen.
This left our end users, many of whom had already looked at some e-learning and decided it was rubbish. And they were right! What they’d seen was basically an electronic book with page after page of written material transferred directly on to the screen. So we had to look for better, more engaging software.
That’s when we bought a subscription to Learning Pool, a community of 110 public sector e-learning practitioners created by the IDeA in 2002, but independent since 2006. The subscription gives us access to over 100 e-learning courses created for local authority officers, many of which we can tailor ourselves using the Authoring Tool. This tool is a clever piece of software that allows us to create our own e-learning quickly and cheaply, in the same way you might create a presentation using Microsoft Powerpoint.
Being able to create our own e-learning in house has really helped us implement our e-learning strategy successfully, for many different reasons, not least the efficiencies we’ve made. This is, of course, music to our senior managers’ ears!
Kirklees Council covers a wide geographical area; centred in Huddersfield, it encompasses Batley, Dewsbury and ‘The Last of the Summer Wine’ country, Holmefirth. Such a broad geographical spread can create a big training headache but, using the ‘e’ element, we can reach all of our 8,500 PC users at the same time, if we have to. There’s no such thing as waiting for classrooms or trainers to become available anymore.
Not having to leave their normal workplace to attend a training session is great not only for learners, but also for their managers and colleagues too. Spending less time away from the job means that colleagues don’t have to provide as much cover while they do their training. The downside is that some delegates miss the free three course lunch they used to get at the training centre.
Traditionally we were a classroom based training team and one of the main problems we had was getting people to complete their pre-work before they came on the course. Very often we’d provide printed documents for delegates to read before hand and, nine times out of ten, the document was put in the desk drawer and not taken out again. So we had to provide another copy of the document at the actual event meaning that, not only had the document not been read, but it has also been produced twice for each delegate. And the trainer spent the first few hours of the session covering what was in the document, which the delegate should have already known.
We’ve managed to reduce this inefficiency by providing e-learning prior to a face to face course and testing whether or not the delegate has reached a certain level of understanding as a result. Delegates can’t attend the course until they reach that level, which cuts down on wasted trainer time and ensures all delegates have a minimum knowledge of the topic in hand before they start.
The classroom is a brilliant place for role playing, testing interview skills, testing presentation skills and that’s what we want to use if for. We want to save our expensive classroom time for those things that can be best learnt face to face and use e-learning to develop knowledge of theories and skills.
The efficiency savings created by e-learning can include reduced travel times, room hires, trainer time, reduced staff cover, printing costs and refreshments. Other benefits include prior knowledge management, and improved recording and evidencing of learning. Our LMS helps us with the statistics we need to evidence learning taking place, which is great for those good CPA scores.
We’ve found that knowledge refreshment is one of the main benefits of e-learning. You can go back quickly and easily to the e-learning you’ve already done, as and when you need it, rather than starting from scratch again.
We consider ourselves to still be playing with e-learning, it’s so much fun and there’s so much more we can do with new technology. Looking back to just even 12 months ago we cringe at we were producing then! We’ve come a long way in that short space of time, but we still have a long way to go.
To hear more on e-learning at Kirklees , view Chris Allan’s podcast- 'To e or not to e - getting the blend right'