In this interview, we talked with Kelly Ripley, Learning Programs and Systems Business Partner at Healthcare Excellence Canada (HEC). She shared how adopting D2L Brightspace has improved the organization’s training—both onboarding for new employees and programs for external learners. She discussed the benefits of using a learning management system (LMS) to ensure consistency and engagement with HEC’s training materials. She also highlighted the collaborative efforts with D2L’s Learning Services team, which has helped HEC find creative ways to meet its goals and make it easier for staff to build better content.
Making Onboarding Better With Asynchronous Learning
“New staff could have easy and timely access to information—no matter when they started”
The greatest impact has been on our employee onboarding process. When we were in the office, I heard colleagues on our people and culture (P&C) team talking about the challenges of scheduling orientation sessions and managing workloads for managers. Because we had new staff joining on a rolling basis, managers found themselves struggling to host orientation sessions frequently, leading to delayed or missed training.
Recognizing that there was a positive association between onboarding experiences and long-term employee satisfaction and retention, we considered this to be a pretty major concern.
We decided to leverage Brightspace, a tool we had been using for external programs for a couple of years, along with the expertise of D2L’s Learning Services team to reimagine our onboarding process and improve employees’ first impressions of the company. By using asynchronous learning, new staff could have easy and timely access to information—no matter when they started. This approach ensured consistency and allowed people to refer back to resources as needed. We also added fun elements like games, badges, videos and discussions to make the experience feel more welcoming.
Feedback from our P&C department’s three-month check-ins with all new employees has been super positive and has encouraged us to expand. Now, we deliver most of our internal training using Brightspace.
Working in Partnership With D2L’s Learning Services Team
“It is truly working with partners.”
Over the years, we’ve conducted a number of projects with D2L’s Learning Services team.
We’ve been fortunate to work with the same project manager, Keiron, for all of them. He has such a good understanding of our organization’s needs and goals, which means that each time we ramp up a new project, it gets faster and easier. Alec, who supports our ongoing work on custom HTML templates, always brings such great ideas to the table and explains technical concepts in the most helpful, accessible ways. He’s taught me so much that I can take away and apply elsewhere. It’s awesome.
I really feel like we do work together as a collaborative team. It’s not simply me engaging an external vendor. It is truly working with partners.
Finding an Approach That Allows for Greater Flexibility
“When things change, it’s been easy to pivot because the hours are ready to go.”
Purchasing buckets of hours has provided our organization with so much flexibility and allowed us to adjust and expand the scope of our projects without needing to go through internal finance approvals every time.
Generally, what we’ve done is budgeted for an appropriate number of hours in each quarter based on the work we anticipate. When things change, it’s been easy to pivot because the hours are ready to go. If something gets placed on hold, the hours just roll over to the next quarter as needed. There’s a lot of flexibility with this approach.
Changing the Game With Custom HTML Templates
“It looks better and takes less time to build, which is kind of a win-win.”
Custom HTML templates have completely changed the way we design learning, both internally and externally. They’ve helped us ensure a consistent look and feel across our programs and make it easier and faster for staff to produce content. So, it looks better and takes less time to build, which is kind of a win-win.
I knew of and used the standard HTML templates that you can download from the Brightspace Community. I used them to revamp some stale, static-looking content in our courses. They were great, and I’d highly recommend them, but we wanted to take it a step further. That’s where we engaged Learning Services to build templates to comply with WCAG 2.1 AA standards, match our branding and be more closely aligned with our needs.
Over time, we’ve continued improving on them, identifying unique design elements that were being repeatedly used in our courses. Alec was really good at bringing in interactive elements—things like flip cards and knowledge checks—to make our content more engaging.
Improving Accessibility Across the Organization
“Our goal was to make the right thing to do the easiest thing to do”
We recently conducted a third-party audit of our LMS and identified great opportunities for us to make the content more accessible for learners. Now, we’re working to build elements, prompts and instructions into our templates to ensure that anyone who’s authoring content in Brightspace is doing so in a way that provides consistency, ensures responsiveness and meets accessibility standards. Our goal was to make the right thing to do the easiest thing to do.
Supporting Bilingual Delivery of Learning Programs
“As a pan-Canadian organization, we deliver programs in both official languages”
As a pan-Canadian organization, we deliver programs in both official languages, which means we need to author the same content in English and French. One of the subsequent projects we took on with Learning Services was to build out an entire suite of templates in French, ensuring that our templates were appropriately coded for French learners and addressing concerns we hadn’t initially considered.
Looking Forward to What the Future Holds
“I love where we’ve landed, and I can’t wait to see where we go from here”
The greatest benefit that I didn’t even anticipate was the collaboration. I didn’t need to go to the Learning Services team and say, “This is precisely what I need,” because I don’t know what’s possible. Because they’re so embedded in Brightspace, I was able to bring ideas forward about what I’m hoping to achieve or the challenges I’m facing, and then working in partnership, they were able to help me figure out what we could do.
Technology is constantly changing, and our organization is growing and expanding with new programs, too. D2L is always coming up with solutions that are new and exciting and meet needs we don’t even know we have yet. It’s just been this ever-evolving process for the past 10 years. I love where we’ve landed, and I can’t wait to see where we go from here.
About Healthcare Excellence Canada
Healthcare Excellence Canada (HEC) works with partners to spread innovation, build capability, and catalyze policy change so that everyone in Canada has safe and high-quality healthcare. Through collaboration with patients, caregivers and people working in healthcare, we turn proven innovations into lasting improvements in all dimensions of healthcare excellence. Launched in 2021, HEC brings together the Canadian Patient Safety Institute and Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement. HEC is an independent, not-for-profit charity funded primarily by Health Canada. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of Health Canada.
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