Scaling up learning: How Motile increased user adoption with their new LMS

In only three years from 1,200 to 15,000 paying members! That is what Motile, a company run by four ambitious entrepreneurs, achieved with Totara Learn. An enormous growth in users, achieved without any staff expansion.

Motile, a start-up in the educational market, offers online teaching methods, training courses and tools to Secondary Vocational Education. They bring together teachers, students and companies, with the goal to stimulate growth and talent development among students.

The Challenge: Five learning platforms, that was too much

Motile was in need of a scalable solution for Vocational colleges, which could help them offer personal and flexible training programmes. In 2020 Motile started servicing five educational institutions, each with their own individual learning platform. These separate environments were extremely labour intensive, caused high costs and prevented Motile from expanding its portfolio and market share. While Motile’s plans were much more ambitious in terms of growth and proposition. Motile’s goal was to increase market share by offering a greater variety of teaching methods to a growing number of educational institutions, all from one central learning environment. And an e-commerce solution and standardizes processes would be key in achieving that growth. Nevertheless,the option should remain to deliver tailor-made solutions per educational institution and per teaching method. Not an easy feat. After an extensive search, Motile came to UP learning for advice on how to achieve all of these goals with Totara.

“We don’t want to spend our time maintaining all kinds of separate learning environments, but on providing excellent and customised education. With Totara, we now have a robust platform that allows us to support all our customers. This saves us time and, more importantly, it offers teachers and students much more convenience.” – Priscilla van der Weerden, Director of Language Development – Motile

The Solution: Digital learning resources without barriers

Together with Totara and UP learning, Motile realized an innovative concept within the educational sector. This starts with a link between the licensing office toegang.org and Totara for the purchase and issuance of temporary licenses for Motile’s digital learning resources. Thanks to the integration, students can start their education without barriers. Automating the process from purchase, billing and access to the termination of licenses is a real ‘must have’ given the large number of transactions.

With Totara all Vocational colleges can offer flexible and personal training programmes to their students via one scalable platform.

The ease with which teachers provide education

Both generic and training-specific modules (courses) are offered on one Totara platform to various educational institutions. Within this one platform, the teachers still have the opportunity to add their own content. In addition, teachers can offer their students the best possible support by:

• Preparing of study plans per class or per individual student.
• Due to the digital submission of assignments, plagiarism check and inline feedback, the teacher does not waste time on unnecessary things when grading assignments and giving feedback.
• Actively monitoring progress of students via tailor-made reports and personal study plans.

This way Motile offers teachers the tools they need to stimulate growth and help students develop their specific talents.

Students are in control of their own progress

Students can easily see which courses to follow in their personal study plan and personal feedback from teachers helps them to continuously improve themselves. Their study plan or progress report also provides them with the exact information they need to take control of their own growth.

Customisations where needed, while staying close to Totara standards

To create this tailor-made yet scalable platform, specific customisations have been developed for Motile. UP has made sure that all customisations are in line with Totara’s standard logic. For example, smart use is made of Totara’s programme functionality in which students can access the right courses based on “job profile” functionality in combination with the division of students into course groups. The study planner and progress report, which are precisely tailored to teachers and students needs, are also customised components, specifically designed for Motile, yet remaining close to Totara’s standard logic.

The Result: growth from 1,200 to 15,000 users in three years

Due to the far-reaching automation of processes, hardly any human intervention is required during the entire purchasing, delivery and invoicing process. So despite of the enormous growth in users during the last three years, Motile has not had to recruit any new people as their hasn’t been an increase in administrative support. Also, the functionality and user-friendliness of the system have increased enormously, while pricing levels have remained the same during all these years.

“The fact that we can support all of our customers and offer them a custom approach from one single Totara platform is unique. In our old model we could never have scaled up to multiple teaching methods with so many users. As we have kept improving our Totara platform each year and have increasingly automated our administrative  processes, we can continue to grow rapidly year by year with the same costs.” – Lennert Coumans, Chief Financial Officer at Motil