LEADING REAL ESTATE COMPANIES OF THE WORLD: LMS MIGRATION
Leading Real Estate Companies of the World’s (LeadingRE) homegrown learning management system (LMS) had become unwieldy as additional companies and members engaged with the platform. It also was outpaced by technology offered by LMS-dedicated companies, so the organization decided to migrate to a commercial system, Docebo.
The Training team faced a variety of challenges, including:
- Migration of data. This was highly complex and took longer than expected. In addition, some data could not be migrated and was “lost” in the new system.
- Loss of some features that could not be replicated in the new platform.
- New login method. Some 200 of LeadingRE’s 580 member companies have SSO and required human-factor time allocated to connect with the right individuals and set up custom login settings for them.
- Security audits. Some clients had intense security documentation needs, so a large number of users had to be “held” out of the migration process for several months.
- Training the training admins. It was difficult to get training admins on group calls, so L&D had to conduct one-on-one sessions with individual training admins at all member companies.
- Getting buy-in from users. Some companies were hesitant about moving to the new system.
- Complexity of the mobile app and getting it published in the iOS app store. The process required the expertise of someone experienced in the regulatory processes involved.
- Google analytics implementation. The platform went live in beta in August, but Google analytics was not working until the end of the month, so some data from this initial period was not captured.
- Zendesk implementation. Attempting to configure the Zendesk plugin caused multiple platform outages.
Program Details
With the new LMS, LeadingRE aimed to provide an improved user experience for its own superadmins, as well as end-user realtors and power-user training administrators at client companies. Some 1,000 users have been trained on the new system to date; the LMS is available to all 140,000 estate agents within the LeadingRE network. External companies are grouped into six categories of access and content delivery; 200 member companies are at the enterprise level tier where their admins can create their own courses.
Some 1,200 courses were migrated from the old system to the new one. Approximately 150 additional new courses were added to the collection in just five months. Content comes from LeadingRE’s team of deans, as well as outside subject matter experts. This content then is produced and edited by LeadingRE’s three-person in-house video editing team and passed to the LMS admin for publication. Typically, several hundred new courses are added each year, and a similar number of courses are retired.
New gamified elements—such as a custom Wordle game—were added, along with subtitles in eight languages for more than 150 old videos, plus all new ones. LeadingRE also is developing a Jeopardy-like webapp and several gamified scenario-based trainings (ride-alongs, elevator chats, walk-and-talk) in the new system.
Results
Training administrators gave the new LMS these average scores (on a scale of 1-10):
Course Publishing: 9.5
Learning Plans: 9.6
Gamification/Contests: 5.5
Full-Screen Video: 9.5
Reports/Certificates: 8.8
LeadingRE also has seen a significant increase in pageviews per user over the length of this initiative, from 10.76 on the first day of the study period rising to 43.85 on day 89. Session duration over time also jumped from 9:06 to 47:55. Finally, growth in sessions per user rose from 1.22 to 3.24 over the studied period of 90 days.