Medborgarskolan is a study organisation with humanistic values. They provide courses and cultural activities which are open to everyone in Sweden, with the aim of stimulating learners’ search for knowledge and encourage creativity and social involvement.
The Challenge
With over 150 thousand people in Sweden taking Medborgarskolan’s courses a year, they needed a platform from which learning content could be delivered. Medborgarskolan is available in almost every region in Sweden, meaning learners are distributed across a wide geographical area with very different requirements. Learners can either attend ‘study circles’ for free, or can choose to pay to access courses which are often led by qualified tutors in both web and classroom environments.
Medborgarskolan needed a flexible solution to help the organization to cooperate and create a bank of support materials for all roles across the organisation. As well as this, in exchange for their government funding, they had been tasked with helping to close the digital gap, meaning the platform needed to be very user-friendly to enable leaders of varying familiarity with a learning system to create online content.
The Solution
Over the last few years, Medborgarskolan has reviewed all kind of different learning management systems. They eventually decided to work with Aleido, who helped them implement Totara Learn.
One of the biggest priorities for Medborgarskolan was that the LMS could talk to their complicated administration system, thus minimising the workload of learning administrators. Aleido ensured that the integration between Totara Learn and their administration system was a success, meaning that users can be created in one system and copied over into the other without any hassle.
Aleido also set up Totara Learn to make it easy to replicate courses. Medborgarskolan uses Totara Learn to create a master course in English, which is then copied into multiple versions for different regions. Medborgarskolan often creates 20—30 versions of a course from the master course, making this a very quick, efficient way to replicate content.
Leaders build their own courses in Totara Learn with support from Medborgarskolan, who are overseeing the quality control process to ensure that all content meets the right standards. The content itself has evolved from simple text based courses to video and user interactive components to help illustrate various concepts, and in the future they intend to enhance this with more types of content.
As well as this, Aleido helped Medborgarskolan switch off all of the functions they don’t currently use in Totara Learn, giving them a much more streamlined user experience without having to worry about unnecessary options. The entire LMS is mobile optimized for learners, giving them a multi-device learning experience, and it’s very easy for course leaders to access reporting and progress tracking for each audience.
The Results
Medborgarskolan are very happy with Totara Learn so far, especially after their lengthy search for the right LMS. They particularly like the flexibility and possibility that Totara Learn gives them, and while they currently have around 600 users, they expect this to grow significantly as the platform is adopted by more learners organically.
They are also very happy with the fact that Totara Learn is open source, as it fits their own ethos of open learning. Medborgarskolan offers much of its content for free and it is open to everyone, making Totara Learn the right fit.
Aleido is an ideal partner for Medborgarskolan, as they wanted a local Swedish partner, and they have a efficient working relationship with them. In the future, they intend to work together to scale the platform and complement it with their own code, and are looking forward to continuing to innovate together.
Customer
Connected Partner
Customer
Region
Sweden
Sectors
Nonprofit
Industry Sizes
Small
Solutions
Learn
Connected Partner
