Australian Sports Commission’s multitenant LMS supports 250,000 learners across Australia

The Australian Sports Commission (ASC), a government agency responsible for supporting and investing in sport across Australia, works to deliver innovative digital solutions to build capability, connectivity, efficiency and best practice across the sport sector.

The Challenge

The challenge was to design an LMS that would provide autonomous learning centers for each National Sporting Organization (NSO) while simultaneously allowing the syndication of a generic learning content library, developed and aggregated from lead agencies within the sector.  Targeting a primarily volunteer and large learning audience and creating a simple, clean user experience was at the forefront of all decision making.

A plugin was needed for tenant-level configurable signup pages for email-based self-registration to support differentiation required by each sport, while maintaining site-level mandatory requirements.

Many sports needed to execute their existing accreditation (certification) rules to deliver learning pathways, which required extension beyond the core Totara platform.

Another challenge was to develop a tenant-level payment integration with alternatives to the standard PayPal payment gateway, to facilitate payment to different payment accounts within a tenancy and support payments within a federated organizational structure.

The Solution

The multitenancy implementation (based on users as tenant members) satisfies the autonomy of each sport joining the learning center, providing tenant branding and user management, as well as content control.

The ASC made a significant investment with Kineo to deliver an extension to Totara’s core certifications that accommodates course sharing to deliver on the all-important accreditations framework prevalent across the sport sector.

The team developed a continuous professional development (CPD) point system requirement within the accreditation extension, satisfying the recertification pathway rules of learners who need to attain learning targets based off minimum point targets, including all activity types, for a full blended learning approach.

A Magento payment integration was built to support the learning center at the tenant level, and a payment gateway with PIN Payments was integrated to enable multiple payment accounts for different learning content within the tenancy – a critical administrative efficiency required in sport.

The timeline for the platform rollout is as follows:

• January – February 2021: ASC team training with Kineo
• January – March 2021: Internal discovery and signoff of design approach by Australian Sport Learning Center
• February – May 2021: Onboarding of four tenants (focusing on requirements gathering, building course blueprints, full content build, testing and training of tenants)
• June 2021: Data migration from legacy system
• June 2021: Four tenants go live: Sport Australia, AIS, Athletics Australia, Swimming Australia
• April – July 2021: Sport Australia and Kineo collaboratively design for accreditations with continuous professional development (CPD) capability (having secured Totara’s permission to use core Totara hooks for this design)
• July – November 2021: Kineo build of accreditations, CPD as well as Magento PIN Payments gateway integration, doubling in size of the ASC delivery team
• June 2021 – December 2021: Onboarding of two tenants (focusing on requirements gathering, building course blueprints, full content build, testing and training of tenants)
• November – December 2021: Data migration from legacy system
• December 2021 – January 2022: Phased go-live rollout for Netball Australia and go-live of non-legacy tenant Squash Australia

The Results

Following the successful two-phase, 12-month migration from a previous LMS platform to Totara, the Totara Learn solution now includes over 250,000 users, with 350,000 course completions and 70,000 certifications, growing each day as more tenants line up to join this revolutionary sector offering.

NSOs can join the learning center as tenants and create a seamless experience for their learners by providing a fully branded one-stop shop for learning. This is cutting edge in multi tenancy for Totara because the project was implemented to specifically silo individual sports within the ASC solution, while allowing syndicated course sharing at the site level. This is an amazing opportunity for sports to share common content and benefit from ASC and other leading sector agency content libraries.

This was an extremely large implementation in a complex multitenancy environment. Totara’s core functionality was extended to include “accreditations,” which is a version of Totara’s core certification with the ability to include syndicated course sharing. Implementation of this significant sector-wide accreditation framework, materially extends the capabilities of Totara’s core certifications offering and it is very attractive to existing vendors in this space.

The key achievements include:

• Four tenancies were onboarded in the first six months, followed by two more within the next six months
• There are ~350 courses including online SCORM, quiz, assessment and feedback activities, some are also incorporated into accreditations and/or programs
• The learning center is fully integrated with Magento payments, supporting PayPal and PIN Payments gateways
• Tenant-level single sign-on or email-based self-registration is permitted
• There are currently ~50,000 active learners on the site, within a total data set of ~250,000

Australian Sports Commission continues to build best-practice approaches and is powering the sector forward into quality L&D by:

• Prioritizing quality and simplicity of learner experience as the benchmark
• Establishing, building, and sharing ideas through strong communities of practice
• Using quality collaboration approaches to grow L&D capabilities, aligned with individual organization and sector-wide business and strategic objectives

This is truly a sector-wide offering, catering to the learning needs of coaches and officials, extending into director-level education, with administrators the next horizon.

“The Australian Sports Commission corporate plan has a strategic focus on digital and industry capability building, with numerous outcomes delivered through the Australian Sport Learning Centre. The learning center team have worked closely and collaboratively with Kineo (with the approval of Totara) to extend core Totara into a simple and fit-for-purpose solution, maintaining the benefits of shared generic sector learning content throughout multiple certification and accreditation pathways in sport. Our philosophy of building repeatable and scalable features provides benefits to large and small NSOs and supports alignment with our modernization and standard, yet personalized approach for learning and accreditation across the sector.”
– Rachel Piastri, Director Australian Sport Learning Centre, Sport Australia