The City of Brussels supports a new way of working and learning with Totara

The City of Brussels (also known as Stad Brussel or Ville de Bruxelles) is the largest municipality and historical center of the Brussels-Capital Region, as well as the capital of Belgium. It is also the administrative center of the European Union, and is thus often dubbed, along with the region, the EU’s capital city.

The Challenge

More than 4,200 collaborators in different departments serve the 179,000 citizens of Brussels, the capital of Belgium. The City of Brussels aims to implement New Ways of Working (NWOW), so it becomes an organization that provides and promotes mobility, communication and collaboration with administration, partners and providers. This way of working demands new technologies, such as new software and hardware. To accomplish this digital transformation and to support the collaborators at best, the City of Brussels wished to develop a new learning platform.

The Solution

The City of Brussels selected The Learning Hub, along with learning management system Totara Lear, after a tendering process.

To start the project, The Learning Hub organized a kick-off workshop in order to determine the specific configuration needs. All internal stakeholders from the City of Brussels were present at this workshop, including the graphic designer, IT specialists, involved HR staff members and L&D staff members. This allowed The Learning Hub to gather input from different perspectives. Based on the information received during this workshop, The Learning Hub finalized the planning with respect to the priority of all requested configurations.

During each sprint, a deep-dive moment was planned to gather immediate feedback on finished tasks, or – in Agile terminology – user stories. Since there are two languages commonly used in the City of Brussels, The Learning Hub made sure that every employee could use the LMS in their own native language.When the configuration was finished and the administrators and course creators were trained, the City of Brussels started a pilot project. During this pilot, the HR department (130 staff members) tested the learning platform.

In order to provide the initial users with enough content, the City of Brussels worked with The Learning Hub’s content provider partner, GoodHabitz. They chose 40 courses from the GoodHabitz library which were loaded into the platform with several courses in different domains such as wellbeing (e.g. stress management), leadership (e.g. teamwork, motivation) and communication (e.g. “The art of feedback”). Employees can easily log in with a single sign-on solution and choose their preferred course from the catalog.

The Results

The digital learning environment was rolled out to all end users, resulting in approximately 2.000 users that will be able to log onto the learning environment via single sign-on.

The City of Brussels is now perfectly capable of managing their own LMS. They are trained upload their own content, create a new report and/or make adjustments to the dashboards when necessary. The Learning Hub is still their partner for all Totara support.

“For a local public administration, it is essential to stick as closely as possible to the realities of daily life, not only of citizens, but also of staff members. Digital technology is becoming more and more a part of everyone’s life and this obviously also applies to our learning and the way we learn. It was therefore obvious for the City of Brussels to be present in this field and to take advantage of the flexibility, immediacy and reach of a tool like e-learning.” – Cyril Vanhamme, L&D Coordinator, City of Brussels