Webanywhere at Learning Technologies 2017

Early in February saw Webanywhere exhibit at London Olympia for Learning Technologies 2017. I have to admit the stand was the best designed yet and I was very proud to see some of the logos displayed of blue chip clients which we have grown over the years.

It was great to take one of our key customer UCLH to dinner and to socialise with the Workplace Learning team. This year we not only  talked about our and platform solutions but also about content services. Our Head of Learning Design Stuart Dyson had flown in from Katowice after missing his plane! Stuart was able to showcase some of the examples of our work and demonstrate our capabilities. Webanywhere now has instructional designers dotted across the globe in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice.

Sean with Gill of UCLH

Webanywhere decided to offer content services a few years ago. In our experience platforms without content don’t get used. Content which talks to the LMS allows you to leverage big data for the learner, the teacher and the manager. You can then track people’s learning and use this feedback to enhance your online courses.

We now offer content to all our customers and this enhances the learner experience providing value for money on the implementation of your learning management systems.

As they use to say at my first job as youngster starting out content is king! And it most certainly is!

Steve Ding with customers at the BETT SHOW

If you over deliver in business customers keep coming back. This is something Webanywhere strives to provide through our “Stretch Beyond” mantra – we don’t just want to meet expectations, we want to exceed them by going the extra mile.

Having a “WOW” customer experience means delivering small acts of kindness and making everyone feel especially important. Webanywhere focuses on 4 main areas to ensure our customer experience is second to none.

We endeavour to deliver great service to our customers. All phone calls have to be answered within 20 seconds and we allow our staff to talk to customers for as long as is needed – however long the customer is comfortable with. As long as they’re happy we don’t care. We don’t use customer care scripts and instead trust our staff to deliver a personalised experience to each customer.

We surprise customers by including product features and extra services they just don’t expect. This might be as simple as a hand written thank-you note or perhaps free usage of one of our software apps – this is our way of saying thank-you.

Webanywhere Staff Christmas 2014

Having knowledgeable staff on the end of the phone is very important, and as a learning company we encourage our staff to become learning animals. Our own internal LMS (based on the same Totara packages we provide to clients) ensures that new staff are well-trained in our company policies, products and processes. We like to front-load the staff training so we don’t damage the customer experience further down the track. Every time a task is cleared in our CRM we ask customers to rate the task and give feedback. This data is then used for further training and process improvements. There is always room for improvement when it comes to the quality of our service.

Speed equals value and, in an increasing digital world and with the speed of the internet, people are becoming less and less patient. Our engineers understand this and create software and websites which load quickly, saving you time. We have strict service-level agreements that we measure and manage in order to address support tickets and customer change-requests in a timely fashion. When customers log issues we call them back straight away in order to guarantee that we understand their requirements and that progress updates are forthcoming.

Our philosophy is “WAW WOW Customers” – Webanywhere WOWs Customers – and we exemplify this in everything we do!

Moodle Moot Edinburgh 2014

One of the key reasons educators and corporations choose Moodle is the strength of the Moodle Community. This year’s Moodle Moot was held in Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange again demonstrating the power of the community where 350 people from across the globe descended on to the Scottish capital.

Martin Dougiamas’ key note was slightly different this year. Martin had flown his children over from Australia to join in with the festivities. Each time a version of Moodle is release traditionally his kids have taken a photo symbolising which version number we are on. The next version of Moodle is 2.7 and will be supported for the next 5 years. Moodle users are recommended to upgrade their installs to this latest version which includes amongst other great features security patches. It was nice to see his kids take a photo with the audience in preparation for the new release in the coming months.

Martin in his key note demonstrated some exciting plans around user notifications and how in particular Moodle can talk to Apple and Google to enable SMART phone notifications. Furthermore, a brand new text editor has been coded from scratch to replace TinyMCE and allows Moodle developers to display only the text editing icons they need enhancing the user experience.

On the Moodle Theme agenda boot strap themes are to be used as standard and the ‘More’ theme was demonstrated showing how teachers can customise their own themes quickly on the fly. Other impressive developments I witnesses included a sophisticated social media and notices module developed by Glasgow College which greatly enhances the student experience online. And finally, I was interested to learn more about conditional learning pathways and how depending on the grades of your students various notifications and additional resources can be unlocked. This enables a personalisation of learning whereby students who are struggling are given extra support materials and tutors are notified to intervene. Gifted and talented learners with higher grades can be challenged with more stretching resources individualising the experience.

Of course it’s not all about the technology it’s the people that make Moodle Moots special. Over lunch I spoke to people from the USA, Poland, Lebanon and Australia – well yes that was Martin Dougiamas the Moodle founder from Perth!