Take your e-learning efforts to the next level: gather the right team.
When it comes to delivering effective e-learning solutions, your goal should be to excel in all of the below:
- making use of the latest tools and features that can help deliver on your goals
- having a scalable, flexible solution that can change with you / adjust to your changing needs as required
- taking all key stakeholders with you on your digital transformation journey – making sure everyone – learners, instructors and people in all relevant departments – are engaged and understanding of their role and responsibilities in the process
- ensuring security, ongoing support and peace of mind – having freedom from dealing with various technical issues and repetitive maintenance tasks
- driving innovation (in products and processes) – not just staying on top of industry trends but leading change and differentiating yourself from competition
Understanding who is the right person or team for each part of the job is key – what makes sense to keep in-house and what needs support from third party partners.
In the complex hybrid world that we live in, where technological advancements continue to pick up pace, not many organisations can keep up with recruiting, upskilling and utilising internal talent in ways that will serve their digital needs efficiently. In most cases, you will have to have a partner, or a few.
By working with an integrated network of various experts you will learn and achieve your desired outcomes quicker; and will be able to build a digital ecosystem that will help your people and your business to thrive.
Here is what to look for when selecting your e-learning support partner:
They have experience with similar projects.
A partner who has a track record of delivering successful custom e-learning solutions in your industry (or one with similar structure and needs) is always a good idea. If you’re a large or growing organisation, you should also look at their experience in delivering projects of the same scale.
When you have engineers and a support team who work daily with organisations like yours, you have the luxury of drawing upon their expertise and a vast, solution-based library. Their tried and tested models and problem solving skills, will help with rapid resolution of any issues and will save you time and money.
They can be your trusted advisor.
Quality technical support is important but you should look for someone who can provide more than that. You want them to be your trusted advisor.
At Catalyst, for example, we hire technical experts who have worked for organisations in the industries that we service, such as the higher education sector. It’s important that our staff, and especially our client services team, understand the key needs, challenges and common scenarios of our client base. This means our team can create value on both the strategy side of the conversation and the technical side, developing solutions that work to achieve our clients’ bigger goals.
Another good example is our custom development team. Our aim is not only to hire top quality programmers but take our candidates through a set of challenges to see how they communicate and understand the end user.
In addition, by keeping active in the industry and collaborating with our partners from across the globe, we absorb fresh approaches to digital learning strategies. We then make it our priority to share our lessons with our clients and to be fully transparent in our development and implementation processes. We see that often organisations are given very limited access to their e-learning applications, or do not have access to data they may need to improve their operations. This is not how we do things at Catalyst. Check our the two blogs below to learn more:
Moodle administrators, how much control do you have over your site?
Getting access to your data in Moodle
They bring the right people to the table.
Whether your goal is to drive learner engagement and performance, to deliver a mission critical solution by a specific deadline or to bring your multiple platforms / learning environments under ‘one roof’ (into a single LMS site), you will need a different mix of people in each scenario to help you get there in the most efficient way. Things like your existing systems and industry will further dictate the composition of the team and tools you will have to gather.
The beauty of LMS products like Moodle is they are supported by a vast community of developers and integration partners. Being a part of this network of support, our team at Catalyst can deliver LMS services that extend beyond our technical excellence. From strategising and customising to bringing the right people together and training your team, we help guide you towards your goal.
They have a partnership mindset.
Sometimes, there will be projects where you will want to be quite hands on with some parts of it. You don’t want a partner who will create barriers for people on your side, whether it’s instructional designers or administrators. You want flexibility in the level of support you’d like to invest in. At Catalyst, we understand that every organisation is unique. Barriers are not what we like to see and as mentioned in the point above, we provide complete transparency and full admin access to client sites.
They can support you with optimised and secure infrastructure.
Surely we don’t need to tell you about the potential cost of a cyber attack, a slow system or a situation where your cloud provider goes down. It is high!
You want a robust and resilient LMS platform and you want it to withstand peak periods of access. You also want it to be flexible and optimised based on patterns of usage. There are various tricks of the trade that can help you save thousands of dollars. After 15+ years of experience with AWS Cloud infrastructure, we continue to learn and fine-tune things to help optimise our infrastructure performance, while managing budgets and avoiding wastage where possible.
We invite you to check the blogs below to learn more about how this benefits our clients and for tips you can pass on to your team:
Cloud automation and orchestration explained
Cloud hosting providers – what you need to know
Are you paying enough attention to your AWS spend?
Your cloud provider goes down, what’s your plan?
They provide 24/7 monitoring and technical support.
Gone are the days where strict office and/or study access hours apply. Your users may (and probably expect to) access your platforms at any time of the day. For large, global organisations that have employees or students in different time zones, things may become even more complicated.
Whether it’s about your user experience in general, or you have specific critical assessment happening at a certain time and place, you want piece of mind that things will go smoothly and any interruptions are dealt with quickly and effectively.
2023 marks seven years since the launch of the Catalyst 24/7 support model – Follow the Sun. Having been involved in high availability application design and architecture for many years prior, it was a natural progression to develop a standardised, reliable support offer.
By selecting the right tech partner for your organisation’s e-learning needs, you will leverage their expertise, learn quicker and be able to build a digital ecosystem that will help your people and your business to thrive.
