Creating a seamless learning experience for over 60,000 CCL learners

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) is a top-ranked, global provider of leadership development. For over 50 years, they have offered cutting-edge solutions to over a million leaders at all levels.

The Challenge 

CCL came to Totara Partner BuildEmpire to consolidate multiple learning platforms and develop their offering further, securing their place at the forefront of executive education.

Previously, CCL had a number of different platforms to deliver courses for different parts of the organisation. CCL chose to use the Totara platform as the one to replace all others as this one was the most robust and customised.

The Solution

Automatic enrolment

As part of this project, BuildEmpire had to make sure the new platform could handle larger volumes of users as well as extending Totara’s grouping functionality in order to facilitate CCL’s desired cohort behaviour.

CCL wanted a way to automatically enrol their students into Totara when they are added to their CRM. So, they built a plugin to connect Service Bus (Microsoft Azure messaging system) with their CRM and Totara platform.

The plugin receives information from the CRM and, from this, triggers the right action in Totara. The plugin also automatically updates any students in Totara if their information is updated in the CRM, making sure the data is always accurate.

Single sign-on

As well as making sure CCL’s CRM and messaging system worked seamlessly with Totara, they also needed Totara to be integrated with their SSO software built using Auth0.

This allows users to be logged into the CCL learning system in a secure way, and from there, access any other CCL systems from just the one login.

Other systems include additional resources, assessments, and communities. This makes the user journey much more fluid and ensures all of the systems are highly secure.

Gamification

CCL utilised BuildEmpire’s gamification features as part of our Edition to build in a leaderboard to track progress and encourage competition. Points are achieved by engaging with content and peers, or by completing course content.

To increase engagement, BuildEmpire implemented CCL’s concept of a ‘Skills Tracker’ and ‘Impact Points’ which allow students to track their progress and compete against each other.

Impact Points are earned by engaging with the course content and interacting with peers, and Skill Points are earned by completing course content and different activities. Individual scores and progress are always visible for the student and the interface design make it clear to students what will earn them points. 

Takeaways and reflection

Takeaways are a good way for students to collect information throughout a program which is particularly interesting to them, and they can export this information in a PDF format for future review purposes.

Students are also encouraged to reflect on their own learning throughout by adding comments to activities and discussing the content with their peers, which not only demonstrates their engagement, but is also proven to enhance cognitive skills.

Key project highlights

After building their Totara LMS with BuildEmpire, CCL saw 90% user growth 30 days after launch.