Tennis Australia supports blended learning across Australia with a streamlined, user-friendly Totara Learn

Tennis Australia (TA) is the governing body of tennis within Australia. For more than 100 years, Tennis Australia has strived to promote the sport of tennis in Australia and to increase opportunities for all Australians to enjoy our great game. As well as promoting tennis and participation, Tennis Australia delivers the Australian Open and other international, state and local events, facilitates player development, and invests in tennis facilities around Australia.

The Tennis Australia Coach Development and Schools teams support the strategic development of tennis in Australia. One of their key roles is the development of high-quality coaches and deliverers (teachers) who drive participation and performance in tennis at all levels and across a variety of environments (clubs, schools, and universities).

The Challenge

Tennis Australia needed to have an enterprise-level LMS which supported the blended delivery of a wide variety of coaching and professional learning programmes to varying internal and external target groups. One of their guiding principles is ‘access to learning anywhere, anytime’; a particular focus for remote and regional environments.

The ability to create dashboards specific to expanding audience requirements (coaches, schools, officials, clubs) provided economies of scale and flexibility within the development environment.

The ability to customise CMS design offered an optimal blend of an attractive and responsive graphical user interface; functionality more accustomed in the higher education or corporate environments.

Critical to timely courseware and resource development was an intuitive system that was easy to learn and navigate, catering to their casual and transient courseware developers and learning facilitators. From a content perspective, the organisation also needed the system to be flexible enough to allow the design and development of media-rich courses, including the integration of third-party video modules.

Additionally, having a system which offered optimal smart and automated scheduling, including calendar integrations and a user-friendly learner portal was critical to our success.

The Solution

The solution was ‘Bounce’, the professional learning platform built using Totara Learn to serve stakeholders including coaches, schools, universities and officials.

Drawn to the ease by which courses could be created and implemented in any format, including SCORM objects, the team was quickly empowered to develop their various coaching programmes for different target audiences and organise these using the ‘program management feature’ within the LMS.

Androgogic, their Totara Partner for this implementation, also assisted with the integration of a third-party video content service, a vital visual learning element of the programme.

The team also made extensive use of the many automated features of ‘learning administration’ readily built into Totara Learn. Even the iCal-enabled Calendar helps to reduce the amount of correspondence as participants can automatically update their own Calendars for bookings.

A key success factor of the platform transfer and LMS development was the close working partnership with Androgogic. This included the detailed project scoping and system specification gathering process, first-class project management and on-time implementation, the exceptional information architecture planning process and a clear understanding and prioritisation of system functionality related to current requirements and their future capacity and vision.

In addition to this, Androgogic offered system training and professional learning for key internal staff, and an extensive first-line service and support for Tennis Australia’s technical implementation team.

“World-class expertise. Professional approach. Elegant solution. Seamless development and implementation. Simply put – peace of mind.”

Tennis Australia also liked the plugin approach to developments. Additional features and functionality were delivered through plugins, ensuring they stayed as close to the core code as possible to ensure that the LMS could be easily maintained in the future. For instance, the third-party video library and lightbox gallery were delivered using plugins.

The Results

With a small team based in Melbourne, Tennis Australia has been able to fulfil their key goals in the following areas:

• Blended learning environments that support face-to-face workshops and courses
• Support for teachers and university students in their professional environments
• Significant cost savings over proprietary LMS alternatives including:
  • Lower per-user fee as well as capacity for growth
  • No longer dependent on third-party proprietary courseware developers – both in the development as well as the revision re: branding and sponsorship changes
  • Ongoing maintenance and upgrades much more straightforward, equating to a lower total cost of ownership. Better user fees and capacity to add new users (scalability)
• Full administrative control of CMS and LMS
• Streamlined login process with email
• Third-party video library plugin that has increased views and provides users with the ability to easily download and use with Tennis Australia Technique app

Androgogic also received an award for Tennis Australia’s Bounce platform, being awarded a silver LearnX award in the category ‘Best New Technology Implementation – Deployment of a Hosted LMS’.

“Totara Learn provides us within our courseware and across the CMS unprecedented ability to be agile and cost effective with respect to modifications in content, and changes in sponsors and branding of our key program areas.”