Core Learning Services helps Global Radio continue to meet its employer health and safety obligations
For the last three years, Core Learning Services (CLS), a consultancy providing e-learning-related products and services, has been working in partnership with Global Radio - the UK's premier commercial radio company – to host Global Radio’s LMS solution for developing health and safety e-learning materials to its staff.
Jonathan Barker, the Head of Health and Safety at Global Radio - the home of such well known radio brands as Heart, Capital and Classic FM - explained: “We’re a national company and have 21 regional radio stations. These radio stations employ a large number of people to deliver various marketing and promotional services to the radio stations’ listeners – often on behalf of advertisers and sponsors.
“Many of these people we employ are on ‘casual contracts’ and we tend to experience, in some instances, quite a high ‘turnover’ among these casual workers. Nonetheless – or, perhaps, particularly because of this - we must provide them with immediate and effective job related training, especially in health and safety subjects,” he added.
“Moreover, because of the ‘casual’ nature of their employment coupled to the fact that they are nationally dispersed working anywhere in the broadcast region, it’s not always possible to get a group of them together to go on a classroom-delivered training course as soon as they join Global Radio,” he continued.
So, some three years ago, realising that ITV had used a similar training solution for production staff and had overcome these issues by introducing e-learning for its staff, Global Radio did the same thing.
“We approached Kalypso, the Oxfordshire-based e-learning content development company which had developed the ITV e-learning and asked them to develop some similar health and safety e-learning materials for us – but it needed to be tailored to the needs of those working in radio rather than television,” Barker said.
“We knew that we didn’t have the facilities to provide the necessary administration – in terms of registering learners, allowing them to enter the e-learning system, tracking their usage of the e-learning materials, assessing their progress and recording their scores,” Barker explained. “So we asked Kalypso to recommend some highly reputable LMS providers with whom we could work and, among others, they suggested Course-Source – the sister company of CLS.
“Our research revealed that the Course-Source LMS could easily interface with our company intranet and so we asked Course-Source to host the LMS – which they’ve done extremely efficiently and effectively ever since,” he said.
Global Radio has two basic health and safety courses available for its staff: one for management and event staff and the other for ground crew and ‘street teams’. Over the least three years, several hundred people have completed these courses – and their progress has been tracked, monitored and reported by the Course-Source LMS.
“We believe that the e-learning course construction and our arrangements for the LMS that hosts the courses are fairly ‘future proof’,” Barker said.
“The whole system ensures that all our staff – including ‘casual’ workers – keep up-to-date on health and safety matters, ensuring as far as possible that they are able to work safely. It also ensures that we, as an employer, can demonstrate that we are complying with all the law’s health and safety requirements.”
Ken Wood, the founder and director of Course-Source Ltd, observed: “Course-Source - the power behind delivery of the award-winning, 300,000 user NHS Connecting for Health ECDL e-learning programme - guarantees its customers no initial set-up costs in terms of IT hardware; no software or maintenance overheads and no costs for installing additional servers on customers’ company intranets.
“We set up the system to our customer’s specifications – leaving them to enjoy hassle-free control of the delivery, management, tracking and reporting of their e-learning initiatives. As with Global Radio, we can integrate our LMS with the customer’s website or corporate intranet, providing a uniform identity and a single-point of access for all learning activities.
“And, in technical terms, the Course-Source LMS is accessible to W3C level A or AA requirements and is AICC and SCORM compliant, with the ability to integrate non-compliant training content,” he added.
In addition to Global Radio, Course-Source customers include several NHS Trusts, the International Organization of Migration (IOM), Trinity Mirror Group and Randstad.
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