Case Study
Depaul
Depaul: Homelessness has no place
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 & rehabilitation and housing services. Last year 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 hit.
The 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.
“Because the nature of our services is very broad, we needed an adaptable solution that covers all the various needs of our service users” added Robert Spencer, E-Learning, Training and Development Officer.
The Solution
After an initial phase of Depaul’s requirements analysis, 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
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 was provided in 2019 after the site was upgraded to Moodle 3.5 and Theme lambda was introduced as part of the upgrade.
The Results
Thanks to Moodle’s intuitivity 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, Moodle has been immensely valuable for Depaul in helping support their new policies and procedures that have been born out of Covid-19.
“ At the beginning of the pandemic we were getting information from the HSE daily and staff needed to be informed on a shift by shift basis so we used Moodle as something to put all of our resources together in order to have these daily updates and to make it really easy and accessible for all staff to get a proper grasp over what’s happening with Covid-19.”- Robert Spencer
In the last four months, the service users within Depaul haven’t had any serious health concerns as a result of the virus and while that is mostly down to their staff, they believe that Moodle has played a significant role in this by informing their employees of the policies and procedures that have been put in place.
“In 2012 we selected Enovation to work with us to customise and implement the Moodle learning management system for our language schools. We wanted a Partner who could deliver on our requirements in terms of implementing a custom solution and providing ongoing hosting and support, that would meet the needs of our Corporate language learning customers. Enovation have delivered all that we have required and their level of service and professionalism has often exceeded our expectations. We look forward to continuing our partnership into the future.”
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