Learning interface: Creating a user-friendly learning management system

Susan Hayes and Lisa Port share their experience of launching a new learning management system at Stewart McKelvey

 

Key takeaway points:

1. Decide if a custom learning management system or an in-house custom solution will work best for your firm.
2. Maintain focus on the user experience.
3. Create a strategy that caters for your firm’s existing and future learning needs and complements your IT department’s plans.
4. Form a small multidisciplinary project team to achieve your objectives and avoid scope creep.
5. Create a rollout strategy that takes into account the time constraints and busy schedules of fee earners.

 

In October 2008, Stewart McKelvey merged its offices across the four Atlantic Canadian provinces. Our newly-formed professional resources and development department (PRD) faced the challenge of administering and tracking the training and development of 230 lawyers across six locations and four different mandatory continuing legal education (CLE) programmes pending with four law societies.

We knew each law society would exercise its autonomy in creating its mandatory regime, but did not know exactly what the learning or reporting requirements would be. What we did know was that we had to be ready before the first education jurisdiction went ‘live’ in January 2010. The hunt for a suitable learning management system (LMS) began in earnest.

In trawling the market for an LMS, we were adamant that the product would have to be simple to use because:
 

• our lawyers span many generations, some of whom are not tech-savvy; and
• we knew our lawyers would have little patience for a software application that was not readily accessible, easy to learn and fast to use.

We were looking for a ‘one-click wonder’.

We hit a brick wall. The LMS market is crowded with vendors, most trying to be all things to all people. There were slick sales presentations of impressive products but nothing, it seemed, that understood what we really needed: a simple user interface and experience with a sophisticated tracking and reporting tool behind the scenes.

Frustrated with the lack of ‘plug and play’ options that suited our needs and aware of our ever-present deadline, our PRD manager was complaining about the situation to her husband one evening and regaling him with our wishlist. Coincidently, her husband is a software developer with significant expertise in the e-learning field. From there, the conversation evolved to the concept of our customised knowledge centre. Our excitement was back.

 

The solution

The solution to our predicament was to create a user-friendly and desktop-accessible LMS. Our department would be able to push training opportunity notifications to customised groups of lawyers right to their desktops. It could notify them in a way that was visible but not obtrusive. At a click of a button, the lawyer could accept the training opportunities and items of interest to him.

This avoided the need for lawyers to use multiple clicks to hunt down their training opportunities via the firm’s intranet. It also avoided our training items getting lost in the long list of emails that clutter lawyers’ inboxes every day.

From the administrative side, it allowed us to target programmes at specific lawyers or groups of lawyers – they only received notifications for programmes relevant to their level of experience and/or practice area. It also allowed us to track training and run custom real-time reports.

The platform was designed to be extensible, enabling us to add other useful features such as a searchable internal telephone directory and a video wall to host training videos for just-in-time learning or instruction (such as tips and tricks for Blackberry usage or getting the most out of Outlook). In this way, the LMS would have broader functionality and evolve into a true knowledge centre for the firm.

The proof of concept and initial stages of development were done using Adobe Flash. However, as the project progressed, it became clear that a switch to a Microsoft-based technology would be advisable to integrate better with the systems that the firm already had or would be moving to in the future. The LMS was therefore recoded using Silverlight. In hindsight, more rigorous analysis from the outset may have avoided the need to stop and start again.

Once coded, the features of the knowledge centre that were ready for rollout were as follows.
 

• The ability to sign up for training events in one click, with appointment saved to lawyers’ Outlook calendars and synchronised with their Blackberrys.
• The ability to access, launch and play audio files and videos from within the application.
• A training history (from year to year) with the ability to print, open in Excel (or save as a pdf) to assist with tracking both accredited and non-accredited CLE.
• A telephone directory providing easy access to each person’s details (phone, email address, work availability of associates and biographies). This included the option to easily filter the directory details by office, practice group, department, name and position.
• The ability to review and launch assigned podcasts and RSS feeds at a glance and easily add new web links and channels stored locally. Users could download mp3s and mp4s to local devices for playback on the go-future release.
• Storage space for key resources of the user’s own choosing (such as course materials and PowerPoint presentations).
• A video wall hosting a variety of internal and external videos for just-in-time training. This had potential for usage as an internal communication tool (for announcements from practice groups or senior management) and the capability for recording directly from users’ desktops.
• A link to the firm’s internal closing document repository, creating easy access by the corporate group. 

 

Buy-in tactics

Obtaining buy-in from the lawyers was critical and we knew it was going to be difficult.

We decided to start with the associates, a group we felt would be more comfortable with embracing a new technology. We sent them an email with a link that would enable the application to be installed at the touch of a button. After the initial installation, the application would be self-updating, avoiding the need for an IT technician to appear at each lawyer’s desk – a considerable time saver.

We rolled it out in one of the offices in our first mandatory education jurisdiction and then asked for feedback. We incorporated the feedback and then rolled it out to the next group and repeated the process among associates in all offices under the mandatory regime.

We then created a competition among all the associates to force them to use the application each day for a week and locate a present that had been embedded somewhere within the knowledge centre.

Over the course of the week, the associate finding the presents in the fastest time would win the latest Blackberry model. A leader board was created for all to see who was in the lead.

The competition was furious and fun to watch. We are concerned, however, that, given the closeness of the competition to the holidays, the winner’s wife may have received a Blackberry for Christmas.

The next stage was for each of the associates to be charged with reverse mentoring a partner in their office to introduce him to the knowledge centre. Our thinking was that partners would be more responsive to one-on-one training.

By appointing associates to take ownership of this, we knew that each partner would have the assistance they needed and that the associates would ensure the application was installed on each partner’s computer. Overall this worked well, although we did still face some resistance at the partner level (some refused the application “just because”).

Once the knowledge centre was introduced in New Brunswick, we rolled it out to the other offices using the same staged approach.

 

Impact assessment

LMS projects are challenging and costly. Even though we chose a customised approach, the project from start to finish involved a bumpy ride in a new post-merger environment, coinciding with an economic recession.

The reaction to the knowledge centre has been positive and many lawyers suggested additional features and enhancements, several of which were incorporated or put on our list for future enhancements.

While it was heartening to know that the knowledge centre was being received with enthusiasm and meeting the needs of lawyers, scope creep had well and truly set in and the additional development took more time than we had bargained for. 

Looking back, we would have benefitted from forming a small multidisciplinary team from the outset, which included representatives from IT, knowledge management, the partnership and associates to ensure that all stakeholders were represented and that the project boundaries were contained appropriately.

The most measurable return on investment has been our ability to generate myriad reports on lawyer training and development at the push of a button. In our most entrenched mandatory jurisdiction we can, at a glance, see who needs assistance in obtaining their hour credits.

However, the real power of the application and the ultimate benefit to our lawyers is the desktop accessibility to materials that support their training and development.

We have not yet begun to scratch the surface in terms of what we can push out and make available to our lawyers. But the technology now exists and is part of our planning.

 

 

Introducing a new learning management system

Do

• Decide if it is the right time to introduce a new learning management system (LMS). For instance, many purchasers of an LMS are now abandoning their existing systems in favour of new systems that integrate talent management
  and HR processes. You will need to decide if an integrated system will serve
  a useful purpose for your organisation.
• Stay focused on the user experience. If an LMS is not easy to use and/or inaccessible because it is only available through the organisation’s intranet, consider whether fee-earners will bother with it.
• Create a small multi-disciplinary team to see the project through to conclusion. Include IT staff in the team to ensure the product fully integrates with the firm’s existing and planned computer systems. Also include at least one partner who has an interest in IT.

Don’t

• Be bamboozled by sales pitches if you are looking into creating a custom LMS. Take time to ensure you understand what is being sold to you and that you have the right product – this means doing your homework to know the right questions to ask. If you decide to create a customised product, ensure it will meet your essential needs.
• Allow scope creep if you are developing an application in-house. The team involved in the project should utilise the partner on the project to manage the project boundaries and any politics that may arise when requests are made for additional features by other stakeholders.

 

  

shayes@stewartmckelvey.com