Background
The Met Office is the national meteorological service for the UK. They provide critical weather services and world-leading climate science, helping people make better decisions to stay safe and thrive.
Challenge
With more than 2,000 employees, the Met Office needed a way to deliver training and education resources quickly and efficiently. Employees are primarily based in the UK but also have temporary and permanent stations in far-flung locations, such as islands in the Atlantic Ocean and Antarctica. They were using two separate Moodle platforms, one for their HR team and one for Met Office College, to train new and experienced weather forecasters. The Met Office’s operational meteorology training is highly regarded worldwide. The Met Office College often train staff from other national meteorological services and teaches modules for meteorology courses, such as at the University of Reading in the UK. Additionally, they provide training for organisations in industries such as gas, oil, energy, and retail.
The Met Office could not make modern technological advances with one platform hosted in-house and the other by a partner. The Met Office wanted to bring together its HR and meteorological training functions in the same platform and under the same directorate, and they realised that to do this, they would need a new learning management system.
The Met Office went out to tender for a new LMS. As strong proponents of open technology, they quickly established that Tōtara Learn would be the right LMS to fit their needs. Plus, Tōtara Partner Catalyst came out on top of their search in the UK government’s G-Cloud digital marketplace(external link).
Solution
The Met Office and Catalyst got to work on the new Tōtara Learn system in mid-2017, and it went live in March 2018. The initial migration from the old Moodle 1.9 system to Tōtara was a big improvement, with the new system fully customised to match the look and feel of the Met Office’s brand.
A large-scale data migration project moved all the content from the previous two systems to the new Tōtara Learn. Initially, the plan was to introduce a new HR information system (HRIS) to coincide with the launch of the new LMS, but the HRIS project was delayed for two years, meaning the LMS launched alone. Fortunately, the flexibility of Tōtara Learn meant that this wasn’t an issue, and when the HRIS finally launched in May 2020, it opened many new doors in terms of what the Met Office team could do with their LMS.
The LMS consists of multiple learning areas. The Met Office’s flagship operational meteorology course is a degree standard course for training weather forecasters. Along with traditional lessons, learners participate in on-the-job training with assessments along the way as well as mandatory compliance training and technical training.
The new HRIS integrates seamlessly with Tōtara Learn, giving the Met Office endless possibilities for creating data-driven learning content. For example, with the HR data, the learning team targeted learning based on where people worked, making smart use of dynamic audiences and the organisational structure provided by the HRIS. When someone moves into a different area of the organisation, the LMS can automatically provide:
- appropriate learning,
- reducing manual input,
- and make the process much more efficient and streamlined.
Before Tōtara Learn, the Met Office was using older-generation software to manage the booking of live training sessions. The previous system was relatively unconfigurable. Switching to Tōtara Learn gave the Met Office access to seminar management functionality, which is particularly valuable in supporting their blended learning strategy. Now, employees can sign up for a live seminar and access all the supporting activities and resources in one place, helping the Met Office to reduce barriers to learning and how people access it.
Tōtara Learn has played a pivotal role throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in training the next cohort of weather forecasters. And in the summer of 2020, it delivered the Met Office’s first-ever remote exams. This system came into its own in the turbulent, rapidly changing times of 2020. Instructors have adapted to the change by adding Microsoft Teams links to course pages to invite learners to remote and live sessions. Additionally, they're supporting their learners by creating interactive activities with Catalyst’s H5P plugin, which is proving very popular.
Results
After the initial move to Tōtara Learn, the Met Office identified a two-fold increase in unique site logins. Since the start of COVID-19, they have increased logins by the same amount again, showing the huge impact a comprehensive, accessible online offering is having for the Met Office.
COVID-19 completely transformed how the Met Office delivers training, and the LMS more than rose to the challenge. Their own employees had easy access to their learning from home, and even their external learners could continue learning remotely. For instance, the UK lockdown meant university students were not attending lectures in person, meaning meteorology students could access the Met Office’s content from their home countries. However, this wasn’t a problem for the new LMS, which enabled students to keep up to date with their learning.
Importantly, opting for an “infinitely configurable” open learning management system such as Tōtara Learn ensures that the Met Office can collaborate with other meteorological organisations worldwide. The global meteorological training community is working towards similar goals, so Tōtara Learn enables the Met Office to share content easily globally. This is also a testament to their strong working relationship with Catalyst, their Tōtara Partner, who are experts in working with and configuring open technology.
Next up, the Met Office is looking to overhaul their onboarding process using Tōtara Engage as an important role in this, with a strong focus on capturing informal learning data and supporting communities of practice. There are currently over 600 courses in the Met Office’s course catalogue, many of which could be adapted into resources in the future with Tōtara Engage. The adaptability of Tōtara Learn means it integrates easily with the Met Office’s new HR system providing them with the freedom to do so much more with their learning.
