The year 2020 brought to everyone’s attention the capacity and capability of the online space. While it had been an available medium for years, enforced remote working and cancelled face-to-face engagements drove the education sector to be rapid adaptors of this new environment.
As soon as lockdown commenced in Victoria in 2020 the CMHL began receiving calls from various training providers exploring options for housing e-learning content. Additionally, AMHS grew their own e-learning offerings to meet the learning needs of their internal workforces.
Background and Purpose
Learning Management Systems (LMS) act as a platform for online content. Most AMHS have their own LMS but there have been barriers to broad adaptation and sharing of training using LMS – the inability to share from one service to another, and competing priorities within a service for space and resources in developing and hosting learning packages. This indicated that having a central LMS for the state would be beneficial to a range of CMHL stakeholders. Statewide training providers who may not have the resources or capacity could position their training for a wide audience. Services and training teams could share packages and resources with other services to view and sample, and the workforce could have an easily accessible space for a variety of online e-learning resources from across the state. The CMHL collaborated with Wetfish, designer of the Commonwealth-funded Mental Health Professional and Ongoing Development (MHPOD) learning portal, to design a purpose-built, easy-to navigate LMS which took all stakeholders into account for one user-friendly platform.
CMHL’s unique position as a statewide workforce development organisation allows us to implement statewide solutions that improve promotion of and access to online training activities. We have capacity to house a LMS that the mental health workforce can easily access and it is a place where AMHS and other organisations can house e-learning packages that are for the broader workforce.
Current Projects
So far we have uploaded the Supported Decision Making e-learning package developed by IMHA. CMHL are working with Barwon Health to develop a Preceptorship for Nurses e-learning package. There is also an Introduction to Clinical Supervision for nurses and allied health e-learning package that is being developed with key stakeholders. These e-leaning packages will be uploaded to the CMHL LMS in 2021. The LMS has been designed to clearly identify the developer of the content.
Procedures and Quality Assessment
We intend to grow the content available on the LMS via some specific processes. CMHL are working closely with our committees to develop a Quality Assessment guideline for e-learning packages. We need to ensure that any package uploaded to the LMS fits with CMHL values and priorities, is current, informed by best practice and not replacing or duplicating any work that sits with the statewide training providers. We will soon implement a process where we engage with AMHS to identify existing key e-learning modules that could be shared statewide via the CMHL LMS. We also anticipate that e-learning modules developed by AMHS from DH funded projects will sit on this LMS moving forward.
Visit our LMS here.
