Digital training is playing an increasingly important role - also in the area of medicine. But how does one go about efficiently organising online training for tens of thousands of participants? At the ärztlichen Akademie für Fort- und Weiterbildung in Nordrhein, deputy managing director Kathrin Hildebrand and her team rely on ILIAS. In this conversation, she tells us why the academy switched from Moodle to ILIAS, how they combine online and classroom formats, and what their plans for the future are.

Alina:

Kathrin, thank you so much for taking the time for this interview and for giving us a few insights into your academy. You mentioned that you offer further training for over 71,000 doctors and twice as many medizinische Fachangestellte [note: medizinische Fachangestellte is a medical role for which there is no exact pendant in English - henceforth called 'MFAs']. A rather impressive number of learners! Do they all have their own user accounts?

Kathrin:

Our courses are targetted primarily at doctors and MFAs from North Rhine Westphalia, but participants from other German federal states can also take part. This is how we end up with such large numbers. Anyone who has taken part in one of our further training programmes gains access to ILIAS via their own user account and retains this access for a year after the course has ended. This means that they are not all on the system at the same time. However, at peak times things can get quite busy. The most users we have had on the system at the same time was around 200.

Alina:

The technical side of things needs to be reliable then. You switched from Moodle to ILIAS in 2022 - a big change! What led to that?

Kathrin:

There were multiple reasons.

One of the most important was that we don't have our own IT department and therefore good support is extremely important to us. Additionally, we wanted a partner who could set up our platform and then develop it according to our needs. Moodle, unfortunately, crashed too often, leaving us without access and with nobody who we could have contacted. With ILIAS, this isn't a problem that we have yet encountered.

Also, we cooperate closely with our sister academies and exchange course content with each other. They use ILIAS. It is much easy to cooperate using identical platforms.

A further advantage is that ILIAS is widely known. We often don't need to explain the platform from the ground up to participants and trainers/speakers who come from academic institutions.

The biggest challenge was moving courses that were already running and in some cases would be doing so still for several months. These ongoing courses also migrated with us to ILIAS.

Alina:

That sounds like a major effort. How did the participants react to the change? 

Kathrin:

Of course, to begin with people had to get used to the change. But this didn't take long, and we were able to organise everything more manageably on ILIAS, partly thanks to training from our service provider, so that everyone quickly found their way around - including our older employees. 

Alina:

Now that you have settled into using ILIAS, how do you use it in your training programmes? Do you mainly work online or do you combine different formats? 

Kathrin:

We use ILIAS for different formats: courses that take place completely online and e-learning, but also to plan sessions which participants are required to attend in person. For example, we supply materials for such events as well as plan excursions using the platform. One could say, that we use ILIAS a lot in the area of blended learning.

Alina:

It sounds like you use ILIAS in a number of different ways. Which functions in ILIAS do you find especially important? 

Kathrin:

We work a lot with forums, groups, online exercises, polls and knowledge tests. We also integrate external authoring tools via SCORM and use the LTI interface.

Alina:

And how do you create your learning units? Do you develop the courses entirely yourself? 

Kathrin:

The learning units are largely based on further education and training regulations as well as sample course books and sample further education curricula. Firstly, we review these regulations and curricula, then we look for suitable instructors for the respective topics. This is followed by several coordination processes via the authoring tools or the lecturers upload some of the materials themselves.

We don't only use ILIAS to plan courses, but also to implement them and to enable communication between participants and trainers. The evaluation of the courses is also currently conducted using ILIAS, but will be soon be augmented with an external tool. This has to do with evaluations. In the new system, with just a few clicks, we can compare all or just certain evaluations in a chart in order to visualise changes.

What will also be very important for us in future, however, is to set certain quality standards for the questions in the evaluations, and to send a message to the right people if these are not met. That way, we can respond to a drop in quality in a course directly, rather than merely acting after the fact.

We have also found that the response rate is much higher if we remove the ‘hurdle’ of having to log in to ILIAS again. It will still be integrated into the learning platform. We will just remind people of this in a separate email with a direct link and QR code to the survey.

Alina:

That sounds well thought out. How do you ensure that participants achieve the desired learning success?

Kathrin:

There are various methods that we actively use. On the one hand, we use tests to check what has been learned, and on the other, we incorporate SCORM-based e-learning units that also test what participants know. Or we use the Exercise Object for homework or tasks that requires preparation. In the course of this, the learning progress function also finds active use.

Alina:

And do you already have plans for the further development of your online offerings?

Kathrin:

We have still a lot of courses in which PowerPoint presentations with added vocal track have been uploaded. We would like to replace these in the future with interactive e-learning units, at the end of which, the acquired knowledge is tested. The integration into ILIAS is to take place via SCORM units.

Alina:

An exciting concept! Another exciting topic: I saw on your website that your team consists almost exclusively of women. Was that a conscious decision or just the way things turned out?

Kathrin:

That is basically just the way things turned out. What one doesn't see on our website is that we have lots of temporary male staff who supervise our courses both online and in person. Our last male colleague retired two years ago. :)

Alina:

One final question. Your academy has been a member of the ILIAS Society since last year. What benefits do you hope to gain from this?

Kathrin:

We hope that we will keep track of the latest stages of development and also be able to contribute a different perspective to that of the universities. The exchange with other organisations is particularly exciting for us: our sister academy from Westphalia-Lippe is also a member and we discuss and agree on a lot of things together and also drive developments in other systems.

As we don't have our own IT department that can develop the software directly for us, we hope that through productive dialogue with the developers, we can give them ideas that can flow into the development of ILIAS.

Alina:

Kathrin, thank you so much! It was fascinating to hear about how you have integrated ILIAS into your training programme and what plans you have for the future.