CIEH

How do you ‘unstick’ yourself when you realise the learning platform you’re using doesn’t support your vision and plans for the future? You migrate to a new learning platform. Not an easy task when you have over 130,000 users from over 200 different companies. But it’s exactly what the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) did when they migrated to aNewSpring.

So, you’re an important and widely known training provider of environmental and public health courses. Your organisation has over 8,000 members worldwide, and you’ve been pioneering professional education for over 140 years. And, yet, it’s not all rosy – your online platform seems to be a bit outdated and your options seem limited. What do you do to prepare yourself for the future?

It’s one thing to start refreshing your content and online courses, but it takes some courage to do what CIEH did. They stepped out of their comfort zone and started looking for other online platforms to support their vision and plans for the future. A great decision – as far as we’re concerned – but there are a few odds and ends to take care of; especially when the migration needs to be done within a few months.

Starting with a new learning platform can provide more opportunities, especially when you choose an option that is technically more advanced. A few examples of this are increasing interaction with learners and creating tailored courses. It's another plus if it also has a more favourable cost structure. Important to note here: although these are benefits in the future, they don't make the migration any easier. It takes time and a lot of effort to prepare for migrating from one platform to the other. You have to understand the old system, inform all your clients and, above all, make sure your content can be moved without losing any data.

According to Stephen Joyce, Programme Manager at CIEH, the hardest part for them was retracing and understanding all the layers of their old system. They had estimated that around 200 companies were using their content, divided into about three layers within the platform. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. They discovered up to seven layers within their platform and over 1,500 companies due to several resellers.

These unexpected numbers made it a lot trickier to move the content and inform everyone involved. This was especially so, because CIEH also had to deal with a number of users without any contact information, who could not be notified of the changes in usage. However, they did manage to do what they wanted: their complete portfolio moved to aNewSpring. It even has an updated structure to prevent any similar misunderstandings from happening in the future.

CIEH managed to realise the migration in just under six weeks. Thanks to a great effort by their fantastic team, their entire portfolio was migrated to aNewSpring all at once. This was done to ensure as few problems as possible for their clients, leaving their team ready to start their next initiative.

Yes, that’s right. They’re not done yet! Part of their motivation to choose aNewSpring was the technological possibilities for the future. They’ll be looking at how to use capabilities like the MemoTrainer and the adaptive learning features in the future.