Aloysius Foundation inspires education staff with online learning

Within education, there has been a tremendous amount of development in recent years. Sometimes because there is simply no choice, but often because the educational institution concerned finds it important to take its own initiative in the field of training and development. Education coordinator Patricia van Oosten and director HRM & communication Marja van den Ouden of the Aloysius Foundation know better than anyone how dynamic the world of education is and how important it is to stimulate development.

They therefore decided in late 2019 to exchange their old learning system for a new platform that met the standards of today and the future. The choice fell on SkillsTown's online learning environment. In this article, Patricia and Marja talk about their experience with this platform and how they deploy it for their employees and organization.

The learning platform at Aloysius

At the end of 2019, the Aloysius Academy went live. This gave all employees of the foundation access to a wide range of online training courses. These include e-learning modules of several hours, short micro-courses of a few minutes and webinars that last half an hour on average. Employees can easily improve their skills this way: from Excel, working with the Domestic Violence and Child Abuse Reporting Code to developing teaching and social skills. "We have a dual perspective," Marja points out.

"We are responsible for the development of children, but we cannot bring about that development without developing ourselves."

We are responsible for the development of children, but we cannot achieve that development without developing ourselves. With the help of the online trainings we want to keep developing ourselves continuously and gain new knowledge and skills. We now link online and offline learning much more, when offline learning meetings are organized we can link them to online modules, before and after.

In addition to developing skills, Aloysius also considers it extremely important to increase the sustainable employability of employees. Therefore, online training courses are also available in the field of health, such as dealing with stress and the right work-life balance. "With the new Aloysius Academy, we offer our employees a complete package. Our training offer is permanently up to date and with the push of a button you register for an e-learning module. In addition, the issue of sustainability is also important to us. We want to give employees the opportunity to influence their own health and remain sustainably employable," says Patricia.

Make the platform work

When choosing and launching a new platform, it is important to involve employees, listen to them and adjust the design to their wishes. This way you can ensure that employees actually use it and that you create a learning environment that really works.

"Employees are really positively surprised and the threshold turns out to be much lower than they thought beforehand."

So that is what the Aloysius Foundation did. Before launching, they thought carefully about the story of the academy and how they wanted to facilitate it within their organization. As a result, they worked with an implementation consultant from SkillsTown to create a plan to launch and keep the online learning platform alive. Thanks to this formula for success, there have already been many positive reactions from employees. Patricia explains enthusiastically, "Employees especially comment on how easy and user-friendly it is. They are really positively surprised and the threshold turns out to be much lower than they thought beforehand. I think this is mainly due to the fact that the offer is available both online and offline and that the knowledge gained can be directly applied to the work.

Combination of online and offline learning

In addition to the online offerings provided through SkillsTown's learning platform, the platform also offers many professionalization opportunities "offline. From complete lab courses or masters to trainings on co-determination, parent involvement and other specific topics. Workshops, trainings and multi-year courses. In addition, physical meetings are displayed in the platform, for which employees can easily register. Marja says: "Our renewed Aloysius Academy can perfectly support professionals and schools in implementing their course and future plans. They already find a very extensive offer there. We are also going to learn more and more together in our organization. So anyone who wants to share his or her knowledge or experiences can certainly do so through the academy and thus inspire colleagues."

"We let colleagues experience the possibilities and once they try the product, it points itself out."

In addition to the offline offerings in the academy, the Aloysius Foundation also uses physical inspiration afternoons to get their employees excited about the platform. For example, they meet with their teams at the SkillsTown office to do the 21st century skills escape room and learn about the possibilities of the learning environment. "One of the meetings was with our colleagues from the education quality department. During the sessions, we inspire employees and show them how they can use the Aloysius Academy. It's about us providing learning solutions for schools that they can use themselves. This way we try to invite every department and employee to contribute their own share in the total solution," said Patricia.

Marja adds, "To enthuse and motivate employees for the platform, we tell the story and show exactly what both the school and the individual can do with it. We let colleagues experience the possibilities and once they have tried the product, it shows itself. This is because we believe in the product and when we do, colleagues do too."