The Academy
UX & elearning
Traditionally, Accelerate delivered all of their training in person, but like many, they had to pivot during the pandemic. And so the Accelerate Academy online learning management system (LMS) was born.
Highlights for Accelerate Academy
Anytime, anywhere – from our research with Accelerate, we knew healthcare professionals are both time-poor and get little paid time off for learning. We wanted to build a solution that had bite-sized modules and worked seamlessly across devices so that people could manage their learning anywhere at anytime.
Content focus – when creating a user experience for an LMS, the content and lessons need to be at the centre of attention. When designing the UI, we made sure that the navigation and ability to move back and forth, while visible, they were not the focus – the learning content was the hero. This allows for a better learning experience and less cognitive stress for the user.
One platform – the way people used to book onto face-to-face courses has become somewhat disjointed with unclear content. The new LMS allows users to easily browse all of the courses available and develop a learner profile as they work through the different courses as Accelerate develops them.
Building a minimal, viable learning management system
It’s possible to spend loads of money on a learning management system and years getting it just right. We didn’t have that luxury. We needed to build something quickly and efficiently, so the team at Accelerate could respond to the ever changing needs of the healthcare sector around them – as people shifted their training needs to purely online during the pandemic.
While the LMS we ended up building is substantial and scalable, it has set Accelerate on a good path for the foreseeable future. We used LearnDash as the scaffolding to build a bespoke user experience for Accelerate’s learners. As part of the process we designed a series of content modules / lessons that the content creators could re-purpose and re-use across different courses, reducing admin time and allowing them to spin up content quickly and efficiently.
We explored some subtle gamification approaches and nudges to help draw learners through the content and worked with the internal team to ensure the content design was efficient, bite-sized and easy for learners to work through in short bursts.
We liked: Helping to explore and redefine how eLearning could work for busy healthcare professionals during the pandemic.
