We’re counting down the days to our 2018 APAC Totara User Conference in Sydney in June, and we thought we’d take the opportunity to catch up with some of our guest speakers ahead of the main conference day. We’ve worked hard to secure a range of speakers who will be sharing the secrets to their success with Totara, and we think that this year’s event is one not to be missed if you want to get the most out of your Totara solution.
Designing a fit-for-purpose LMS at Berry Street:
Aliki Christou, Learning Innovations Consultant at Berry Street, will be talking to attendees all about how her not-for-profit organisation benefits from the freedom and flexibility of a Totara Learn platform built by Sprout Labs. If you want to find out more about the background of Berry Street’s LMS, you can read the case study here. Since we originally spoke to Aliki about how Berry Street is using Totara Learn, they have been working on opening up their platform to a significant external audience, making this session valuable for organisations in all sectors who may wish to address learners outside the organisation.
“This session will be especially useful for organisations that want to hear from a not-for-profit that made the jump from a proprietary LMS to an open source Totara solution and the impact of this change. Just like the Totara tree, your LMS should be able to support your organisation’s growth in almost any environment.” – Aliki Christou, Berry Street
Using Totara Learn to support CPD at Law Society NSW
Sharmaine Gewohn, The Law Society of New South Wales
Head of Professional Development Sharmaine Gewohn will be delving into how Law Society NSW uses Totara Learn to support its continuing professional development (CPD) with the help of Androgogic. This session will focus on the key challenges faced by organisations like Sharmaine’s today, including staying relevant in a changing environment and ensuring representation even with a diverse learner audience.
“This session will be useful for anyone interested in how we started from nothing to create something that is unique, customised, sustainable and didn’t break the budget.”
ICC’s experience with online learning:
ICC Academy’s Director of Technology, Federica Pelosa, will be exploring the complex topic of implementation regarding her organisation’s work with Kineo. Following a six-month procurement process, they chose Totara Learn as their LMS thanks to its modularity and flexibility. Federica will talk about the challenges associated with both selling online learning and working with large financial institutions, as well as maintaining great customer satisfaction levels and keeping up with rapidly changing technology requirements.
“We have worked on an integrated system that includes an LMS (Totara Learn) and a student information system (SIS) that hosts administration and ecommerce; therefore the session will be useful to any organisation involved with training, higher education or the online learning market. We want people to know that the customer experience is important, but easy system management should be too!” – Federica Pelosa, ICC Academy
Migrating from two Moodles at Australia’s #1 trauma and teaching hospital:
Nerida Barton, Manager of E-learning Services at Alfred Health, will be sharing her experience of migrating from two different Moodle platforms to a single Totara Learn solution with Androgogic. The reason for this migration was a need to manage annual training courses more efficiently, manage staff enrolments more accurately and to move towards a more corporate-style LMS while still maintaining the flexibility of an open source system. Nerida’s session will be useful for anyone working in a healthcare organisation or anyone considering migrating from Moodle to Totara Learn.
“Some of the major challenges affecting healthcare organisations today include managing many staff doing multiple training courses across the year with differing requirements, and managing all of this with a really small team. Totara has given us greater flexibility to automate staff enrolments and manage annual training, so has helped us increase efficiency and accuracy.” – Nerida Bardon, Alfred Health
Designing high-quality blended social learning:
Donovan Stone, Organisational Development Consultant at business services company Ricoh, will be taking to the stage to talk about how they implemented Totara to replace their existing, outdated LMS. Totara’s flexibility, scalability and user friendliness were ideal for allowing Ricoh to offer great value to a widely distributed audience of internal and external learners. In this session, Donovan and his colleague Brett Stapleton will share how they used Totara to democratise learning by moving from a proprietary platform to an open source solution, along with how an LMS can offer value you haven’t even considered.
“There is an increased level of expectation from staff around learning – the idea of ‘just in time, just enough, just for me. Along with this, the future of our business size and structure is uncertain, so we need an LMS that can support the flexibility we need.” – Donovan Stone, Ricoh
How the LMS is being used to efficiently and effectively train IT and other consultants at Datacom:
Dina Yang, Learning & Development Manager at Datacom will be explaining why the ease of setup and rapid deployment of e-learning modules to a large learner audience made Totara Learn their LMS of choice. Dina’s session will focus on the challenges faced by Datacom, such as being able to quantify the performance of training activities and linking this to business performance, and how Totara Learn helped solve them. Attendees will also discover how Datacom has managed to reduce training time without compromising on quality for more efficient training.
“My session will be useful for organisations who have a requirement to be agile and must be able to prove the ROI of their L&D efforts. I want people to come away knowing how to strategically plan what to include in their LMS and how to align this with their business requirements.” – Dina Yang, Datacom
