EduCare supports more than 1 million course completions in one year

EduCare is the UK’s leading provider of essential duty of care and safeguarding training with over one million course completions in the last 12 months.

EduCare is part of Tes Global, which has a highly successful teacher Education and Training arm, Tes Institute, which is now one of the UK’s largest qualifiers of teachers and a leading edtech provider of digital services to teachers and schools.

The Challenge

EduCare had a made-to-measure proprietary learning environment with 7 separate learning management systems (LMS). This was complex and costly to maintain, and they were heavily reliant on a single external agency. The wanted to consolidate the platforms into one LMS, and have a more contemporary, user-friendly and feature-rich system.

It was also key that the new LMS was open source and supported by multiple partners to give them freedom of choice should they need to switch providers in the future (to prevent vendor “lock-in” in the future).

Management of the system was previously outsourced, and they wanted an intuitive system that was flexible enough to be customized for their made-to-measure needs and onboarding processes so they could take much of the management in house with ongoing support from a partner.

Other key requirements included:

• Performance. Be able to cope with over 500,000 users and over one million course completions per year;
• Flexible. Give the freedom to innovate to create a customized, seamless and automated journey from point of purchase to completion for users from large organizations and individuals, and to integrate with e-Commerce and CRM systems;
• Multi-tenancy. Offer full multi-tenancy, including the ability for clients (over 6,000 organizations) to manage users, allocate learning, view certificates and progress, have made-to-measure reports and individually customized/branded areas and SSO/API options (i.e. log in via their company intranet etc.);
• Cost-effective and grow with them. Provide the freedom to save and reduce customer service calls, combine seven existing learning management systems into one, and be able to grow with the organization; and
• Contemporary and engaging. Be fit for the 21st century and fully compatible with mobile devices to give users the freedom to learn when they want and how they want.

The Solution

After a thorough procurement process, EduCare selected Accipio as their Totara Partner. They were impressed with our dynamic and contemporary approach. We worked with EduCare to implement the world’s largest Totara Learn platform with over 500,000 users.

We combined 7 existing learning management systems into one, and the migration was completed three months early. This involved migrating 100,000s of users, 120+ courses and 6,000 customers.

Some of the key customized features included:

• Multi-tenancy setup for 6,000 customer organizations with their made-to-measure branding, access to manage users (via our organization manager) and certificates/progress, made-to-measure dashboards and high levels of automation;
• Multiple e-Commerce integrations for various core market partners which allow individuals and organization users to purchase courses and gain direct access to these within the Totara site for a defined period of time;
• Implemented various forms of single-sign-on (SSO) with customer systems, social profiles (Microsoft, LinkedIn, Google) and via link from a new custom SSO. Integration of SSO into Totara hierarchy to automatically assign the organization based on the SSO method used; and
• A new web services plugin that pushes learning results to specific customer systems.

• An “archive courses” block that provides for the tailored release of new/updated courses while preserving access to old ones;
• Expiry dates for organizations to remove access to their users if the account is not renewed;
• Custom course format to bring out progress and improved navigation;
• Complex hosting setup to cope with 1000s of concurrent users;
• Custom login workflow with custom feedback messages based on reason for failure (i.e. incorrect password, expired organization, suspended account etc.); and
• Customized certificate extension to pull in organization logo from multi-tenancy set up.

The Results

Freedom to save

We saved them considerable time by:

• combining 7 Learning Platforms into the largest Totara Learn platform in the world (and delivering 3 months ahead of schedule); and
• automating manual tasks and freeing up resources to rapidly grow their client base.

Freedom to learn

• Feedback from end users has been overwhelmingly positive, with 98.5% saying they would recommend EduCare’s online learning service.
• The platform uses a made-to-measure, engaging course format to focus on completion (so learners know exactly what they need to do, and when) and improve intra-course navigation.

Freedom to innovate

Totara’s flexible open-source nature has allowed us to develop innovative plugins to tailor the platform for Educare which has:

• revamped and streamlined processes, putting ownership in the hands of clients, through various plugins and integrations; and
• enabled Educare to sell directly to customers via our e-Commerce solutions and automate the onboarding process.

Freedom of choice

Because Edcuare uses Totara, they are no longer restricted to working with just one provider or a propriety code base. They now have freedom of choice, supported by a competitive landscape which keeps on innovating.

They have been able to take platform management and customer service in-house, and they have built the system around their processes – not the other way around.

“Creating a new LMS to meet EduCare’s growing requirements was an exciting project. There were many ‘unknowns’ due to our complex customer base and demanding performance requirements. The Accipio team rose to the challenge and worked tirelessly to create innovative solutions that delivered against our needs and provided time and cost efficiencies for EduCare staff and customers.

Together, we have pushed the boundaries of the possible and we are very proud of what has been achieved in a relatively short space of time. We have delivered essential safeguarding and duty of care knowledge to a vast audience via the Totara Learn system, and we are very proud to boast 1,000,000 courses have been completed in one year.– Kate Atwell, Executive Director, EduCare Learning Ltd.”