The Action Learning Institute (ALI) is an Australian Registered Training Organisation based in Adelaide and Launceston focused on action learning assessments, and is owned by Cother Consulting Pty Ltd, a family-owned and operated Australian company.
- Training organisation innovates in action learning assessment space with a centralised, secure, portable laravel web application .
- User-friendly assessment screen was developed to attach all action-based evidence recorded in real time for review and assessment later.
- Custom API allowed qualifications, units, their criteria and packaging requirements to be fed accurately into the system.
- Parent company hopes to disrupt current action learning space by standardising the way that assessments are carried out, using their software.
Summary
Background
The action learning process requires the observation and recording of specific actions conducted by the participant and assessing these against a set criteria.
During assessment, the completion of said criteria is observed and recorded visually, accompanied by the notes of a facilitator observing these actions at the time. This is then passed onto an assessor whose job is to review and assess all evidence against the criteria of the certification or qualification.
Prior to the development of the new software, Action Learning Institute (ALI) gathered all loose evidence (video, images, files) manually, stored these within a folder locally or Google drive, and recorded notes and timestamps within an excel spreadsheet.
Additional hurdles they faced were:
- The time it took to process and certify participants
- There was no central repository that linked criteria to the evidence; loose evidence was stored separate to the assessment criteria
- It was difficult to extrapolate data when needed
- Translating the certification criteria into was complex and required a trained individual to ensure that criteria, units and qualifications were correctly documented based on packaging requirements
- Due to how manual it was there was a high chance of human error
- Assessments required a deep understanding of the process and certification criteria in order to efficiently carry out the process
- Difficulty facilitating audits to prove assessments which was a requirement for government funding
Key Phases
1
Discovery
We spent time with facilitators and assessors, reviewing spreadsheets and observing, learning and understanding the unique requirements of the action learning process. We also became familiar with software that they had used for contracts and researched documentation around standards that govern these assessments.
2
Planning
This consisted of providing photorealistic mockups, demonstrating the user journey and experience for each screen, ensuring that everything made sense and met the goals of ALI. A considerable amount of time was spent on the assessment screen as it was a core part of the software.
3
Development
During the development phase, projects are broken down into sprints, each set up to build key functionality, components and features. These sprints are managed by a dedicated project manager.
As sprints are completed, they are deployed onto a staging site where our clients are invited to test and provide feedback on newly implemented functionality or features.
Each week our project manager meets with the client to provide progress reports on work completed and plans for the following sprint. These meetings are essential to keep our clients informed throughout the life of the project, and allows a space where any concerns, suggestions or questions can be raised or addressed.
Challenges
As an assessment learning software, it was an inherently complex process to source the qualifications, units, their criteria and packaging requirements and feed these components into the system in a way that was accurate.
Building a custom API integration
The government training website where these key components were derived from, did not have a robust API. This required us to develop an interface that could grab information, parse it to make sense of the data and structure the information in a way that we could build qualifications within the ALI system.
Designing the assessment screen
The second challenge surrounded the design and implementation of the assessment screen which in itself was a huge challenge due to the overwhelming amount of data that could be captured, and the pivotal function it played in the application.
We needed to ensure that it met the user requirements to allow for quick and easy uploading of evidence, correctly associated with the right assessment and without data duplication.
Meeting storage requirements
Another complexity was related to the amount of evidence that would be collected for each participant over many assessments. The most common format of evidence was video, which was live streamed into the app and recorded. This evidence would take a significant amount of space, especially when some assessments would run up to 4 hours at a time, so it needed to be managed in a scalable and secure data storage environment.
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Features of the new myLearningMap (MLM) software
- Create learning programs
- Assign participants and companies
- Build learning plans for each participant
- Mobile access for participants and facilitators to record evidence within a workshop
- Utilises mobile camera functionality to record evidence in real time
- Collect data and record it into the system in a structure and organised format that is ready for assessors to use to determine if criteria has been met
- Reporting, certificate generation, progress reports, individual learning plan reports, facilitator reports
- Reporting for government funding
The Result
In their endeavour to resolve their hurdles and their desire to innovate the action learning assessment process, MLM has become a coveted piece of software that is predicted to change the action learning landscape.
Owned by parent company Cother Digital Pty Ltd, they hope to standardise the way that action learning assessments are carried out by encouraging other action learning organisations to use their software.
Request an initial consultation
One of our consultants will be in touch to answer all of your questions
