The Shadowfax Corporation is a private, non-profit human service agency that supports individuals with disabilities throughout York County in Pennsylvania. Shadowfax provides a wide range of services including residential services, employment supports, and prevocational training.
Like other disability service organizations, Shadowfax has its share of mandatory compliance training, including extensive training requirements that address company and state policies. Being able to easily provide this specialized training to its employees proved to be challenging.
“We needed something where…all new hires could review all company policies in one place,” says Josh Romero, IT Manager at Shadowfax. New Shadowfax employees had to review over 85 separate PDFs of company policies. “We have a lot of different policies, a lot of different trainings, [and] we wanted it to be easier for staff to use.”
Fortunately, this is where Relias Course Creator stepped in.
Relias Course Creator is a rapid authoring tool that allows you to quickly build your own content and easily collaborate with subject matter experts and stakeholders. This content can then be published directly to the Relias platform and shared with learners.
Relias Course Creator Provides Quick and Easy Content Management
Prior to using Course Creator, Shadowfax managed their internally-created courses and policies through a WordPress website. They had to manually manage up to 24 different learning modules, have knowledge of HTML to fully operate the site, and pay an external contractor to maintain it.
When they made the switch to Relias Course Creator, the difference in ease of use became abundantly clear. “It has been very enjoyable to use and very simple,” says Romero. “The presentation is much better in Relias.”
“It has been very enjoyable to use and very simple. The presentation is much better in Relias.”
—Josh Romero
Course Creator comes with pre-planned course templates, as well as the ability to create your own. It also incorporates elements of adult learning theory in its programming to ensure content creators are able to make quality coursework.
Changes to the content within courses can be simply managed within Course Creator as well. “Every few weeks a policy is updated or uploaded,” says Adam Nixon, Training Manager at Shadowfax. “We can update and push out those changes into the Relias platform very easily.”
Ease of Use Saves Frustration — And Costs
Leaders at Shadowfax found the learning curve on Course Creator to be minimal. “As soon as you get ready to start uploading a document, it’s pretty intuitive,” Romero says.
It also became easier for multiple stakeholders to collaborate on courses. “We really liked that Adam and I were able to see each other’s projects,” Romero says. “When we had a big team working on this, it was awesome — we could set goals, set parameters, you weren’t on top of each other talking, and it was all within one system.”
The streamlined functionality of Relias Course Creator has had a positive impact on the staff at Shadowfax as well. “By being able to combine all of our documents together in a course, we are saving our staff hundreds of hours a year, if not thousands,” says Romero. “It takes about half the time and half the frustration.”
The decrease in hours of training time has resulted in cost savings for Shadowfax. The option to build internal content directly on the Relias platform also meant that they no longer had to support a contracted programmer for their WordPress site.
“When you really put the nickels and dimes next to each other, we’re actually saving money,” says Nixon.
After presenting their choice of LMS to executive leadership, Romero says most of the executive team’s response was “Why don’t we have this already?”
Quality Product Makes Organizational Buy-In Easy
The benefit of using Relias to help manage Shadowfax’s content creation needs were quickly apparent as Romero and Nixon researched other learning management solutions. After reviewing over 20 different LMS platforms, Relias was the clear winner.
“Relias is the only system that met all of our needs, who provided all the features we needed, at the price point we needed,” says Romero.
The quality of the Relias platform and Relias Course Creator was easy to justify to leadership. After presenting their choice of LMS to executive leadership, Romero says most of the executive team’s response was “Why don’t we have this already?”
Now, after creating over 16 different courses in Course Creator, Nixon says “We are very happy with what we have.”
