Streamlining eLearning content creation and collaboration at a hospital trust

The LTHT Organisational Learning team creates learning materials for clinical and non-clinical staff. It also plays an important role in providing support for learning creation in separate Corporate Service Units (CSUs) in the wider NHS Trust.

This means that the team not only has to work on creating a large number of high-quality eLearning pieces, but that it must regularly provide access to eLearning authoring tools for busy subject matter experts to contribute and/or give feedback. These SMEs are best served by no-nonsense software that allows them to provide their essential input and get on with their work.

The need to safeguard the trust’s IT systems provides an extra layer of challenge. There’s a multi-step process to install software packages on trust computers, and a delay for support if anything should go wrong.

The Organisational Learning team started using Gomo in March 2020, choosing the tool because it provided an easy-to-understand environment for the trust’s non-technical SMEs while still retaining plenty of design options for the team’s skilled learning officers.

Using Gomo, the team is able to set up templates and themes to establish the information flow and identity of its courses. SMEs can then be provided with access to the course editor where they can enter text and diagrams easily, or comment on work-in-progress courses with corrections and ideas. The team has also got significant use out of Gomo’s testing features. It is able to share links to upcoming courses with users and test access and functionality on any device.

These testing features are one of the big benefits of cloud-based tools like Gomo. A desktop-based alternative would require installation every time an SME in another part of the trust wanted to create content. With Gomo, SMEs just need an internet browser and a login—and IT doesn’t need to get involved. The team is also able to easily jump in and support SMEs if they’re unsure what to do, accessing the course and editing/advising as necessary.

Furthermore, Gomo has created more options in terms of the kinds of content the team is allowed to create. It isn’t restricted to creating courses that can only be completed via a quiz—learners can simply click to confirm, or can get tagged with completion when they have viewed all screens. Even relatively simple features—such as being able to place external video content (e.g. from YouTube) within a simple introductory screen—have helped the team contextualize and endorse a greater range of helpful content.

More complex learning packages also benefit from Gomo’s flexibility: the trust’s successful Adult Nutrition package required three different levels pitched at different job roles within the trust. Learning officers were able to easily duplicate and adjust the course content to tailor it to specific audiences.

The Organisational Learning team reports that using Gomo has resulted in a dramatic reduction in support requests from users completing eLearning packages. It attributes this to Gomo’s responsiveness and the tool’s robust implementation of various drop-in assets, themes, and templates that allow for engaging design without the potential for errors introduced in courses built from scratch.

These improvements over previous eLearning methods are reflected in an increase in training compliance, suggesting that people are less intimidated by the system. This has led to the trust-wide compliance rate for mandatory and priority courses—both now built using Gomo—reaching 80%, having previously been described as “very low”. The team considers the ease of access of Gomo’s courses for both editors and learners a big factor in this improvement.

As a consequence of the Organisational Learning team’s great work within Gomo since March 2020, the reputation of the tool is growing within LTHT. CSUs within the trust are now actively requesting Gomo access—typically staff members with no background in eLearning—feel confident that they can learn to use the tool.