Depaul is an Irish charity helping people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness; they operate across 29 services in Ireland with over 450 staff.
The cross-border organisation works in 5 main areas of service provision: homeless prevention, working with families & young people, providing high support accommodation, health and rehabilitation and housing services.
In 2019 alone, Depaul’s staff assisted approximately 6,000 people who needed vital support. That’s why for Depaul, making sure their employees receive the best training is paramount, even more so since Covid-19 has hit.
Challenge
In order to offer the best support and guidance to their service users, Depaul needs to provide all staff with high-quality learning courses and training programmes covering all 5 areas that the charity serves. So they approached Enovation in 2015, to build a learning platform based on Moodle that could help serve their mission.
Solution
After an initial analysis of Depaul’s requirements, the team at Enovation crafted a highly customisable learning platform that houses all of their various e-learning modules. One of the key features also required was to track user engagement.
“User engagement monitoring at the course or activity level is essential to us. It means that we can see how our staff are doing and discuss their progress.” – Robert Spencer, E-Learning, Training and Development Officer.
The team at Enovation and Depaul worked closely together to make a number of updates and additions to the platform in recent times. Training on-site administration and course creation were provided in 2019 after the site was upgraded to Moodle 3.5 and Theme lambda was introduced as part of that upgrade.
Results
Thanks to Moodle’s intuitive use and richness in instructional design tools, Depaul’s team were able to create a significant learning programme that addresses the needs of their service users within two years.
“I had used Moodle before in a previous role and realised that it has so much potential, so we went forward and started creating learning content within Moodle for all of our staff. And we have grown that content from two e-Learning modules in 2018 to currently 50 individual online courses that cover different areas such as management, personal effectiveness, and also our Reaching Potential Programme which delivers modules looking at the complex needs of our service users such as drug or alcohol addictions, mental health within the homeless population and many more.”
Moodle has also been key in helping Depaul increase employee engagement and internal communication across the organisation. “We communicate a lot through Moodle and want our employees to engage with the information they’re given and to talk on the forums and Moodle has really given us the ability to do that. Essentially, transitioning from face-to-face learning sessions to an online model has freed up time for our staff so they can spend more time interacting with our service users.”
Since the pandemic began in early 2020, Moodle has been immensely valuable for Depaul in helping support their new policies and procedures that were born out of Covid-19.
In the months following the outbreak, the service users within Depaul did not have any serious health concerns as a result of the virus and while that is mostly down to their staff, they believe that Moodle played a significant role in this by informing their employees of the policies and procedures that were put in place.
About Enovation
Enovation is one of Europe’s leading providers of managed technology services based on open source software. They are experts in creating integrated, enterprise scale technology solutions for challenging business requirements using only proven products such as Moodle.
To learn more about them, visit Enovation’s Partner Profile.
