e learning age - the magazine for the learning organisation

Community care

The Marie Curie Cancer Care charity is best known for its network of nurses working in the community, providing end-of-life care for patients in their homes and in its nine hospices in the UK.  Marie Curie employs more than 2,700 nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals.

To ensure everyone working for Marie Curie has the skills to do their job effectively, one of the training solutions on offer is a Learn and Develop site, created using Moodle, one of the world’s leading open source virtual learning environments.

In 2009 the site needed remodelling to ensure that it was more responsive to the needs of Marie Curie.  Synergy Learning worked with the charity to create a Moodle site that was more informative, attractive and intuitive.

The site now engages users from the first visit by allowing them to access useful information without having to log in.  As the site is most often used to access Marie Curie’s extensive course portfolio, Synergy Learning coded it to offer course information specific to each user.  There is also a full list of courses available, alphabetised and categorised for convenience.

Learning through the new site was made more engaging and exciting with the use of e-books, video and audio content.  The results have been positive, with a 30% rise in the number of log-ins to the site within six months of going live.

Fraud busters

Legal & General has saved £1m by taking a creative approach to compliance learning.

As a financial services provider, Legal & General is an obvious target for financial crime. It must minimise the risk of fraud by ensuring that its employees are aware of fraud trends, can recognise criminal behaviour, methods and activities, and know how to report fraudulent activity. By radically changing its approach to fraud awareness, it has redefined what effective e-learning is within the company, significantly raising awareness of fraud issues and reducing the risk to the business.

By engaging staff upfront in the design and storyboarding a ‘day in the life of L&G staff’, it produced a programme that engaged learners, encouraged the right attitude and behaviour change, and benefited Legal & General from compliance and business perspectives.

Comparing the learner downtime of the new approach versus the old classroom programme shows a saving of £1.1m from the initiative.

95.2% of employees have now completed the fraud module, the highest of any L&G e-learning module.

And the consistent message of the programme and automatic tracking has released the group fraud team to focus on its business role.

Find out more.

Budget down, ROI up

Cheshire ICT services, which provides ICT shared services in the NHS, faced some serious challenges last year when its ability to deliver learning face to face was reduced through staff vacancies, fewer classrooms and a significantly reduced budget.

The team was challenged to develop learning and collaboration using free tools, and to experiment with working on online environments already available within the service, such as SharePoint and Virtual Classroom. As a result, it responded quickly to the challenges. Despite funding for the year having been reduced to £4,000, the team was quick to address a number of important projects – for example, providing timely information skills that the swine flu pandemic demanded, and harnessing virtual classrooms in a series of programmes to boost staff IT productivity.

Its achievements include:

• continuing to respond to changing organisational needs despite working on funding of only £4,000 for the year
• having the confidence to leverage existing technologies and to deliver more for minimal investment
• demonstrating ROI – more than £250,000 was saved over four months in terms of time alone.

Find out more.