How BSLM is Unlocking New Opportunities With Educational Technology

Brightspace has been transformational for us.

Andrew Howie, chief finance and commercial officer, BSLM

What are your priorities at the BSLM?

Our charitable aim is to promote education around lifestyle medicine, helping to reduce the prevalence of chronic illness. We provide an essential resource for people to continue their professional development within lifestyle medicine and stay up to date with industry trends. But we need to get better at understanding how, when and where learning happens. We know that good learning practices can unlock new revenue streams and increase value for members. So, we’re focused on making our content more relevant and engaging.

How are you doing this?

The way people want to learn, or access content, has changed. They don’t want to watch long presentations or sit through lots of face-to-face learning. We need to prioritise self-paced learning and find ways to make education as accessible and high quality as possible.

The BSLM is also a relatively new association. And while lifestyle medicine is a growing sector, it is still not valued highly enough within the NHS. We want it to be completely embedded within NHS thinking, and to do this we have to make sure that our content is highly credible, evidence-led and clinically robust. It is mostly GPs and surgeons that take our courses and they, quite rightly, have very high expectations.

Everything we design now is based around the principles of bespoke learning and continuous assessment. We are also prioritising immersive and interactive content and have increased our video and audio offerings.

How has technology helped?

We would have made progress without D2L Brightspace, but we wouldn’t have got to where we are as quickly as we have without it. Nor would we have uncovered as many additional opportunities. It’s been transformational for us.

Our core accreditation in lifestyle medicine, for example, has been built in Brightspace. It offers 60 hours of learning which can be delivered as one package or offered as individual pieces of learning material. We have so much more flexibility in terms of what we can offer members.

We’re also using feedback from our courses to inform the design of future content.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth?

We anticipate that up to 60% of our future revenue will come from education spend. Improving our e-learning capabilities has been key to this growth and we have seen multiple opportunities open up.

For example, we’re looking at how we can build standalone CPD products, as well as taster courses that might be of interest to the general public—such as an introduction to the Mediterranean diet or understanding gut microbiomes.

Alongside these more bite-sized learning modules we’re also looking at whether we could develop a Masters programme with a university, using our core accreditation course as the foundation.

Working on a revenue share model, we have also been able to offer use of the platform to partners in other countries across Africa, to benefit their members.

We’re talking to HR departments within corporates to see whether our courses can be used as part of an organisation’s worker wellbeing programme, as well as looking at bringing our content into schools.

All of this supports our aim to bring lifestyle medicine into the mainstream.

The learning management system (LMS) has been a big investment for the association, so we want to make sure we are maximising its potential. We also need to commit time to making sure everyone is on board with using it. This has been a big focus internally. You wouldn’t recruit a new person and then not spend any time with them. We need to treat the platform in the same way to really see its full potential.

To explore these themes further, and hear from more associations on the industry landscape and how their learning strategy has opened up fresh opportunity for growth, check out our brand-new whitepaper, Unlocking opportunity: how professional associations are using learning to empower members and grow revenue.

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