Background
Universitas 21 is a global network of research-intensive universities that empowers students, researchers and staff to share excellence, collaborate across borders and exchange knowledge. It focuses on supporting students, undergraduates and educational innovation.
The member-focused network also prides itself on promoting the value of internationalisation and multinational collaboration through its programs, activities and initiatives.
The opportunity: dwindling member engagement
Universitas 21(external link)'s Researcher Engagement team is responsible for organising collaborative research awards. While reviewing their applications, they noticed a reduction in the number of applicants from member universities.
Investigating the cause of dwindling applications, they discovered that a lack of interaction between members was harming engagement. To continue the company’s mission of uniting researchers and nurturing collaboration, they needed a central platform and portal for members to meet and collaborate virtually. The platform would need to:
- act as a repository for information and data
- encourage collaboration on different projects
- enable communication between members
- enable members to host meetings.
The solution: a flexible, central collaboration platform
Looking for a flexible LMS that would meet their needs, the team chose Catalyst IT and Totara Learn and praised the open source eLearning solution provider's "responsiveness and creativity."
With Tōtara Learn’s adaptable features and being familiar to users involved in academic research because it is based on Moodle, the Researcher Engagement team knew it would be ideal for their needs.
Working with Catalyst IT, the team developed a multi-purpose learning platform called “U21 Community”.
"We choose Tōtara Learn because the system is adaptable, and we have the support to shape it to our specific needs." — Connie Wan, Researcher Engagement Manager at Universitas 21
The results: increased adaptability and member engagement
The U21 Community platform enables the Researcher Engagement team to nurture collaboration, knowledge sharing and interaction between its members.
The platform helps increase engagement, empower subject matter experts and gives multiple members from different disciplines – ranging from senior management directors to VPs of research and other committees – control over their content.
Among other features (like Tōtara Learn’s customisable dashboard and user profile customisation), the Universitas 21 team loved the following Tōtara Learn features for measuring engagement and managing users:
- hierarchies
- HR import
- search user function
- reporting
- activities.
The Universitas 21 team plans to roll out 'touch base' surveys for different U21 Community users across levels. These surveys will gather feedback from content managers who upload content and members who attend workshops.
