Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service Case Study

Provision of a key training platform

Delivered for ROYAL BERKSHIRE FIRE SERVICE

AT A GLANCE

Delivery of a Moodle learning management system
Training on eLearning content creation
Custom plug-in development

THE CLIENT

Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service (RBFRS) provides prevention, protection, and response services across the County of Berkshire. Twelve whole time and four on-call fire stations cover 486 square miles, from Langley in the East, to Lambourn in the West. It serves a diverse cultural population of 863,000, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The authority offers a wide range of services to help keep communities safe, including safety and protection advice to residents and businesses. They also enforce fire safety legislation and help to reduce fire risk in buildings.

THE CHALLENGE

On behalf of RBFRS, Royal Berkshire Fire Authority issued an invitation to tender for a platform to build and host eLearning courses, as well as provide reporting on these courses.

Staff members at all levels of the Service need to complete various courses to undertake their roles. The system also needed to track user progress in order to complete personal development plans, ensuring that staff meet fire service standards.

The system needed to understand complex organisational structures and provide reports on user progress.

OUR APPROACH

SkillSet won the tender with a solution based on the Moodle open-source learning management system (LMS). Moodle supports numerous ways of creating engaging course content within the system itself, using activities. These include (but are not limited to):

Lessons.
Assignments.
File attachments.
Video.
Quizzes.

Moodle also supports eLearning content compliant with SCORM, AICC, and Tin Can. It also integrates with RBFB’s active directory for authentication purposes.

SkillSet used role-based groupings to map qualifications, training and the learning standards of the fire and rescue service. This allowed us to create learning plans and assign competencies to them, allowing reporting and tracking of users’ progress.

SkillSet also partnered with RBFRS to advise them on eLearning content creation. The tool we jointly selected for this task was Articulate 360. This is a license-based eLearning tool, which can be used to create engaging and interactive content. We created a course template and provided training for the relevant staff so that they could design and build content themselves.

SkillSet used our experience in content creation to work with the authority to ensure their content is displayed to learners in the most effective way. We also helped to ensure that the content supports a variety of learning styles and engages the learner.

THE RESULTS

SkillSet continues to maintain and support the Moodle learning management system for the fire service. Most recently we built a custom plug-in to integrate the LMS with the RBFRS’s HR System, allowing them to map their organisational structure to the Moodle LMS.