Elevating Real Estate Training: REINSW’s Brightspace Journey
Since the adoption of Brightspace in February 2023, the REINSW has witnessed a transformative impact on its training programs.
Aaron Barber is the general manager of the Real Estate Institute of New South Wales (REINSW), a professional association representing thousands of real estate agents and property professionals across New South Wales. Below, Aaron talks about the importance of focusing on the learner and leaning into data to understand and adapt to learners’ needs.
Putting the Learner at the Centre
We had an LMS that didn’t meet our mark when it came to being learner-centric. Because of that, our course completion and learner satisfaction rates were very low.
When I came on board, it was about making sure that as a registered training organisation (RTO), we focused on the learner—how they were learning, what best suited them and where they needed support.
We went to market looking for a new LMS, and D2L Brightspace was the top-performing platform that met our requirements. It has quite a tool range to enable us to support our learners. Through video assessments and surveys, we can get to know each learner, and the data the system provides also enables us to understand the pains and gains that our learners are experiencing.
Leveraging Data to Get to Know Learners
I tell other RTOs that if you don’t understand your data, you don’t understand your learner. If you’re solely trying to be heavily compliant with what regulators are looking for, learners won’t be satisfied and are going to tell the government and others in your industry that you’re not a good training provider.
We’re using Brightspace to provide a lot of data that we then analyse. We look at our content statistics to make sure they’re on par with the rules and criteria we need to meet and to understand how learners are spending their time. Is the material too complex? Are they skipping over it? Do we need to add elements to slow them down and help them understand the content they’re working through?
We also look at statistics within quizzes. What are the completion rates? How long do learners spend on a quiz? How many attempts does it take to get correct answers? If the question is too hard, have we covered the content in a way that allows our learners to successfully answer the question?
Additionally, we put in a literacy and numeracy assessment before learners even touch their course. This gives us a better understanding of where they might have issues with reading, writing or mathematical skills and allows our trainers and assessors to contextualise the learning to meet their needs.
We’re using all the data points within Brightspace to get to know our learners. This helps ensure we’re continually improving our processes so that I can hand-on-heart say that we’re doing the right thing as an association by our industry and our members.
Supporting Members and Staff With Emerging Technologies
As an association, the way we see the world moving forward is that we need to be very upfront with artificial intelligence (AI).
For our members, we’ve introduced AI-powered bots into our training so our learners can interact with them to practice how to go to court to represent their industry. Also, at the moment, our help desk is only open for 12 hours a day when our staff are at work. What we’re doing now is training another AI bot to take the phones and be a helpline for questions after hours.
We’ve also introduced an AI virtual assistant onto our board that can assist our directors. They can ask the virtual assistant, “What was the decision 20 years ago? Does this align with our mission and values? How will this assist our members?” So far, they’ve really embraced it. They think it’s fantastic that instead of having to read 400-page documents, the virtual assistant can summarise, analyse and interpret them.
We have a closed system. We’ve uploaded our data and have trained our system to be able to look into just it or specific websites. It can’t go outside those parameters.
Seeing the Impacts of Change
Within the first three to four months of implementing Brightspace, our learner satisfaction rate soared from 30% to 100%. We saw a massive change in how our learners were interacting with the system, with 100% of them logging in and interacting with the content. We also jumped from a 2-star Google rating to a 4.6 on the LMS itself.
By making small changes within the LMS to meet the needs of our learners, it completely changed how the industry saw us as a training provider.
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