LMS Update and How My Organization Has Adapted to Online Learning

Our LMS implementation has been painful. Our nurse educators are keen to get everything they have been doing in classes or have access to in PowerPoint up onto the system. Not the best idea. So I’m slowly taking a topic at a time (mostly what is being driven by Ministry mandatory training first) and creating courses. We rolled out the system with registrations to classroom based courses and are biggest promoter is our Health and Wellness classes (pilates, yoga, etc). That got many people use to using the system, learning how to find and register for a course. It also got me to learn new ways to manipulate the system to “advertise” or list the courses in a more attractive manner than the default settings allow.

The next large push that met much resistance happened this past summer. We rolled out our Core Curriculum modules. 6 modules that are time consuming and painfully detailed. With little time to create them, the online versions are not entirely better than the paper versions of these courses. However, some of the feedback regarding the new online courses has been very positive.

Having to do training online has been a large change for many of our staff. There have been complaints of computer to staff ratios. There is, and always seems to be the argument, do staff train on work time or on their own time. If it is mandatory it should be on work time, but budgets are tight and no one has money to do this arrangement. So time is an issue even when it is online and they can go in and out as often as they want. However, the more I spread this message the more staff like that idea.

Management was very keen on the idea that staff could no longer do one paper test and pass it to all their colleagues to copy and hand in. The fact that online training is individual, increased the accountability factor tenfold and that is an extremely positive thing.

We are only just looking into integrating some blended courses into our curriculum, but this will most likely come with leadership courses that we offer and perhaps unit orientations. We have not quite got to that stage although I have presented many ideas.

The stats that my LMS put out aren’t the best at this point in time. An upgrade that as been promised from the vendor for quite some time. I’m crossing my fingers it comes soon. I do know that since we launched the annual mandatory 6 courses (WHMIS, Occupational Health and Safety, Infection Prevention and Control, Incident Reporting, Accessibility, Emergency Codes) that 1000 people have registered for at least 1 of the 6 courses and 700+ have completed them. Not super stats based on the paper version, but on the other hand I do know that all of these people that passed actually looked at the material this year and didn’t just fill in the bubbles on the answer sheet.

Some problems that we had come up were that even though I had 3 or 4 sets of eyes look at the courses, some errors were still found. These were spelling, grammatical and the occasional wrong answer to a multiple choice question. When these errors were corrected and uploaded as new versions into the LMS, learners that had registered prior to the new upload seemed to have error messages occur.

Staff that needed to take a course more than once to make grade often didn’t have a certificate of completion issued to them.

Some courses didn’t track completion. Some frozen and after multiple attempts learners got too frustrated to continue.

Some courses wouldn’t relaunch and resume where a learner left off.

After some time with the system now live and working more with the vendor most of these issues have now been resolved and any further issues seem to be more user error than anything. I was really hoping the launch would be more seamless and less painful for my users, but that was a bit of a dream looking back now. I should have known how it might roll out considering the implementation struggles I had.

I’m happy to see that people are using, most are keen too, and that their hasn’t been a lot of negative feedback. I’m most excited when I have a late-career nurse call me, frustrated that they can’t figure it out, and after a few minutes on the phone with them walking step-by-step through registration and course launch that they exclaim “wow, I really can do this.”