The Lighting Industry Association

 D2L has been integral to how the LIA offers development options on a global level, and it has shaped our thinking. Now, we challenge ourselves to focus more on how we get a learner from point A to point B and the skills gap that bridges.

Teresa Beazley, Commercial & Training Manager, LIA 

Challenge 

To digitise tutor-led, in-person, manually administrated learning 

Whilst the LIA is a UK trade association, its members are often global and have employees in different parts of the world. Historically, the association’s training was face-to-face in the UK. To attend courses that ran for a number of days, learners who had to travel could be away for a working week. Travel and accommodations incurred costs, and work would have to be reallocated or deferred. This was costly for member companies and difficult to manage and inconvenient for learners.  

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 challenged the LIA to approach its learning offering in a different way, taking it online through real-time online collaboration tools. 

“But again, it was very much a tutor-led presentation environment,” says Teresa Beazley, LIA Commercial & Training Manager. “And it was done in UK time, so we were unable to offer the opportunity to learn to people who worked further afield.”   

Added to that, the structure of the learning content lent itself to long, technically focused, and in-depth courses, which were not always the best option for the topics or learners compared with varied course lengths and bite-sized, short-course delivery.  

“One of our most popular courses is a four-consecutive-day certificate course with 12 weeks to submit a project,” explains Teresa. “People get learning fatigue, so they may not absorb two-thirds of the course, and then they have 12 weeks to do a project that is very technically driven.” 

Learners would have to find a way to submit their sizeable portfolios of work to the tutor, and this was typically by post, which carried with it a risk of work getting lost, and it was also administratively onerous. 

“Joining instructions, information, queries, certificate generation, course materials—all of that was done manually,” Teresa adds. This manual effort originally added up to the time of two and a half employees undertaking administrative tasks.  

Solution

 A ‘flipped’ classroom approach with shorter modules and dynamic content 

The LIA set out to digitise its training and move to a more dynamic delivery model. Teresa recognised that learners would benefit from a more customised experience, where training is based on individual learners’ needs, backgrounds and learning styles. 

A “flipped” classroom approach would provide the LIA’s extensive, experience-rich content for learners to consume and absorb in a way that works for them, before coming to a collaborative learning space. “Putting the underpinning knowledge on an online platform encourages people to learn in their own way, in their own time, and continue to learn and build a community where they can share ideas,” says Teresa. 

The strategy was to change the narrative around what learning looks like, and implement best practices where you ultimately flip the classroom.

Teresa Beazley, Commercial & Training Manager, LIA 

The LIA looked at options for a learning management system (LMS) that would meet its challenges and discovered Brightspace, which could integrate with The LIA’s online presence to reduce bookings administration and had a user interface that offered ease of use and accessibility.  

After a pilot phase, seven new courses were launched on Brightspace and, within the space of a year, the LIA intends to have modularised every course and delivered them through the platform. The association has embraced fully the opportunities of a digital environment, using flip cards, videos, in situ assessments, discussion boards and Creator+, D2L’s e-learning authoring tool, to optimise content.  

“The Creator+ elements have enabled us to make it interactive, without the need for a trainer to be present, and to make content engaging so as to maximise the embedding of underpinning knowledge,” explains Teresa. “Making the journey as learner-focused as possible so that people come out of each course, or module within a course, hungry to research more.” 

Results 

Customised, flexible learning supporting a talent pipeline  

The LIA has transformed its learning by immersing itself in all that a digital learning environment can offer. Learners save the time and cost of travelling to lengthy in-person courses, can learn in their own time and at their own pace, and select from a larger pool of shorter courses—expected to grow to around 50—to build and sustain knowledge and skills in the areas they require.  

The certificate course that was four days in person has been fully modularised. Now, all learning modules take no more than around 60 minutes, enabling learners to devise their own pathways.  

“It’s that assumption that everyone will go through the same learning journey,” notes Teresa. “We wanted to give some ability to customise what that journey looks like. People can dip in and out of our courses to better fit around their work and personal commitments. They can move laterally around our profession map or pick a specialism and move hierarchically to build up the skills they’re currently lacking.” 

Ongoing measurement will be through evaluative questions that look at how far a learner has come at the end of a course and compare it to where they were at the beginning, based on the objectives of the course. However, to date, the LIA is delighted with a record-level response to the content.  

In the first two weeks, we saw the biggest uptake in any of our course materials in the past 10 years. 

Teresa Beazley, Commercial & Training Manager, LIA 

The learning experience is still an engaging one, with a range of interactive features that encourage ongoing learning, and collaboration is enabled through discussion forums. “We’re very passionate about our learners having somewhere safe, somewhere they trust, to discuss,” says Teresa. 

The burden of manual administration has reduced dramatically from two-and-a-half employees’ time, down to a forecast one-quarter of one employee’s time. “It’s enabled us to re-establish elements and workstreams within the business we couldn’t previously undertake because staff were stretched,” says Teresa. “Someone who spent a lot of time on financial administration is now solely focused on member engagement, so we’re better able to serve our customers.” 

Similarly, the LIA’s subject matter experts can save time when they create courses, using templates developed for the modules. They particularly like being able to make minor amendments while courses are live to keep the content up to date.  

Change, understandably, can be challenging, but Teresa estimates that 80-90% of trainers “absolutely love” the new approach, and feedback from members has been “exceptionally positive”. Teresa believes that integrating technology into the member journey has elevated the organisation’s reputation and contributed to member recruitment and retention, as a range of systems now work together to meet members’ needs whenever they want to access something, including outside office hours.  

Throughout, the LIA and D2L have worked successfully as a partnership to make the LIA’s learning vision a reality. “I’ve worked with a lot of LMS providers, and I found D2L to be exceptional,” says Teresa. “The team gave so much support during the initial phases, integration and post-integration. I speak to our technical learning manager every couple of weeks and without D2L we wouldn’t have been able to get off the ground as quickly as we have.” 

The LIA is not done innovating. It is discussing with member organisations how it can help them onboard employees new to the industry, repurposing some of the LIA’s content, and similarly supporting learning for members’ supply chains.  

The LIA set out to deliver flexible, engaging learning to help build and maintain a pipeline of skilled employees in the lighting industry. In a short amount of time, it transitioned from a tutor-led, one-size-fits-all, largely in-person delivery model to a fully interactive, immersive learning experience where lighting professionals can manage their own time, learn in their own way and customise their learning journeys.  

 
To learn more about Brightspace for membership organisations, visit https://www.d2l.com/en-eu/solutions/associations/.