The FA’s Academy of Learning: Leveraging Learning Technologies to Support the Beautiful Game at Grass Roots | Learning Technologies 2015

29th January 2015

Supporting the development of football through digital

Darren Sandbach | Digital Learning Manager | The FA

Lewis John | Solutions Consultant | City & Guilds Kineo

• Introductions

• Who are FA Learning?

• Background to need for an LMS

• Grasping opportunities

• A year of digital revolution

Agenda

• Lewis John – Solutions Consultant at City & Guilds Kineo

• Darren Sandbach – Digital Learning Manager at The FA

Introductions

• Educational arm of The FA

• Responsible for the delivery of a qualifications and CPD framework to multiple disciplines:

• Coaching

• Refereeing

• Psychology

• Sports Science

• Medical

• Safeguarding

• Talent ID (scouting)

Who are FA Learning?

St. George’s Park

Current reality of coach education

Current online enrolment process

CFA Website

Members’ Services

Login

My Football

Online Courses

Enrol

Login to payment

Verify details

Enter payment info

Confirm 3d Secure

Close confirmation

Refresh page

Click continue course

Click launchDisable pop-up blocker

Click launch again

Our challenge

• Around 120,000 formal qualifications certified across those 7 disciplines, delivered to some 80,000 learners per year

• 150,000 hours of CPD delivered per season (and growing) for members of The FA Licensed Coaches’ Club, which is currently 32,000 members strong

• A desire to modernise our approach to learning which is broadly classroom and pitch based.

• A series of legacy systems underpinning our processes which are unsupported and stifling our ability to innovate.

• Support for:

• Full blended learning programmes

• Automatic pre-requisite checks

• CRM integration

• 52 organisations, with separate Merchant IDs, organising courses and taking payments from candidates

• Easy to use, streamlining existing processes for both the administrator and the customer

• Printable certificates

• So much more than I can talk about here…

• BUT…must be cost effective!

Our needs

• System was broadly capable out of the box

• Customisations around single sign on, CRM integration and payments

• Enterprise level support meant we didn’t need to recruit or upskill internally

• Flexible and iterative approach to development and deployment

• We get on well with the C&G Kineo team

• The C&G “umbrella” solved a lot of internal stakeholder challenges

• Cost was right, business case stacked up

Why C&G Kineo and Totara?

Introducing City & Guilds Kineo

2 million awards

500 qualifications

10,000 centres

80 countries

Use by hundreds of

organisations

4 million+ users

70+ Partners

Over 200 staff

8 countries

150 blue chip

clients

Ranked # 1

750,000 awards

35,000 members

A global business

Introducing City & Guilds Kineo

• Learning Provider of the Year 2014 (Learning Awards)

• Best Learning Game 2014 (Elearning Age)

• US number 1 ranked company

• Brandon Hall (Best Blended Programme)

• LearnX platinum (Best Learning Design Technology)

Award winning credentials

Introducing City & Guilds Kineo

Delivering…

Elearning &

online learningHosting and support

services

Mobile /

Multi-device

learning

LMS and

Learning Portals

Apprenticeships Consultancy and

Training

Qualifications

and

Accreditations

Marketing and

Awareness

Introducing City & Guilds Kineo

Totara: Enterprise LMS for the corporate sector

− Commercial / Corporate distribution of the world leading

Moodle LMS

− Scalable for large enterprises

− A high quality branded experience

− Extensive and rich functionality set

− Cost effective, open-source solution

− No vendor lock in

− Large & active community of users and developers

Introducing City & Guilds Kineo

Totara LMS key features (summary)

− Manage and track learning

− Integration with HR and other business systems

− Map organisation hierarchies, job families and roles

− Set and manage individual development plans

− Classroom management and online booking

− Audience and programme management

− Manage team development

− Deliver and support informal and social learning

− Performance management and 360 reviews

− Rich reporting features including automated reports

The Solution

Totara LMS (v2.5) Open Source Enterprise LMS with 3x key customisations:

• Single Sign-On (SSO)

• + Web services to pull through header / footer from thefa.com

• CRM integration – two way (flat-file in, web services out)

• Ecommerce payments – Totara integrated with Barclays SmartPay

• + Massive data import: 275,000 user records & 500,000 historical records!

Staying as close to core as possible: Customisation via ‘Plugin’ architecture/approach.

Let’s look at some of the details… hopefully providing a useful insight!

Solution implemented for The FA

The Solution

Overview

LMS

The FA Website

Barclays Smart

Pay

The FA’s CRM

System

User accesses via SSO

1. Completion data

returned from the LMS to

the CRM

2. Request for award

creation from the LMS to

the CRM

1. Historic course

completion data passed to

the LMS.

2. User details send daily

to the LMS

3. Return the unique

identifier for any awards

created in the CRM

User is redirected to Barclays Smart

Pay to transact payment, for access

to courses

User is redirected back to the LMS once

the payment process has been completed

1. LMS requests additional

user profile details for new

accounts

2. LMS requests dynamic

header / footer

The Solution

Single Sign-On (SSO)

Totara LMS integrated with TheFA.com account management:

• User logs into thefa.com website (or creates account)• User clicks on link to the FA Learning from the website main menu• User is automatically logged in to the LMS using cookie-based authentication (using

encrypted domain cookies)• NB Solution uses data mapping to pull through the key profile data (username, first

name, last name, email etc) - required where account information has been created/updated since last CRM sync (via daily import)!

• …to create a seamless user journey from the website to the VLE

The Solution

Single Sign-On (SSO): User authentication

LMSthefa.comBrowser thefa.com user management

User submits credentials

Authenticate user

[Authentication successful]: Create cookie

Redirect to LMS page requested

:Request LMS URL with cookie

Decode cookie and extract FAN

Create / Update user account

:Response requested page on the LMS

Authenticate user

Decode cookie and extract firstname, lastname and email address

The Solution

Web services – consistent header / footer across ‘thefa.com’ sites

The Solution

CRM integration

Pulling and pushing data from The FA’s CRM:

• The FA has CRM containing completion records of users who have taken courses (completed learning) historically

• Several courses require [pre-requisite] courses to be completed to ensure the learners have the right grounding [before signing up to some training courses]

• Hence, users’ historic training records need to be fed through to / back from the LMS (nb learners can sign up for training outside the LMS)

• Totara RPL, Programs and Audiences used to manage pre-requisites (via historical completions import). Web services used to send data to the CRM.

The Solution

Ecommerce – payment process

The FA required a robust payment mechanism using Barclays SmartPay[payment gateway]. Kineo adopted a modular approach based on a plugin architecture:

• Payment Enrolment plugin• Promotional Code Manager plugin• Smart Pay Gateway plugin• Promotional Code report source• Courses Purchased report source

The Solution

Ecommerce – Totara process steps

LMS SmartPay

User selects session

System 'reserves' space

:Parameters and user directed to SmartPay

User completes payment in SmartPay

System enrol user on course

System marks user as 'booked' on face-to-face session

User accesses course

:Notifiaction of successful payment

User is redirected to Payment Results screen

The Solution

Ecommerce – payment process

User accesses

The FA website

and authenticates

User clicks a link

taking them to the

LMS (user is

automatically

assigned via SSO)

User clicks ‘Find

Awards’

User clicks a

category of

courses

User clicks ‘View

Award’

User clicks

‘Access Award’

User selects face-to-

face session and

enters discount code.

User selects ‘Confirm

Details’

User is redirected

to Barclays Smart

Pay to complete

payment

User is redirected

to the course page

for the award

purchased

Start

Finish

1 2 3 4

5

6789

User confirms details.

User selects ‘Pay’

10

High-level user journey for a typical user purchasing access to a specific award. • Orange: User is accessing The FA’s website• Green: User is accessing the LMS• Blue: User is accessing Barclays Smart Pay Hosted Payment pages.

The Solution

Massive data import!

In order to capture all prior learning completed we needed to import all [historical] completions for all users (despite the fact that our target audience is sub-50k for the first year):

• 275,000 user records imported• 500,000 historical records imported/processed and mapped to Totara

course and program RPL completions

That’s a lot of data to import/process!

The Solution

Screen shots – ‘Find awards’

The Solution

Screen shots – ‘View awards’

The Solution

Project review

This was a fantastic project to work on! We thoroughly enjoyed working with Darren and The FA team. Some of the key success factors were:

• Close working partnership• Very detailed scoping and specification, with thorough documentation• MoSCoW prioritisation approach to phasing, to ensure the platform

could be delivered to schedule but met the core project needs• Plugin approach to developments – staying as close to core

functionality as possible to ensure the maintainability of the solution• Most of the complexity is ‘under the hood’ but vital nonetheless!