The Client

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is Canada’s national public broadcaster and is a crown corporation that provides radio and television services to Canadians. With over 7,000 staff, the CBC is Canada’s largest cultural institution. Owned by all Canadians, it is the only cultural institution and the only broadcaster offering services to all Canadians in English and in French across Canada. The CBC has three divisions – Corporate, based in Ottawa; English Network, based in Toronto; and French Network, based in Montreal.

The Challenge

CBC was examining the potential of the use of e-learning adoption to address its training needs. While there were a number of potential e-learning opportunities available, none had been implemented. They had challenges with traditional training methods due to the dispersed nature of the various CBC locations across Canada. This created extensive logistical challenges for instructor travel and the potential for messages to become inconsistent during the training. CBC had already undertaken several initiatives to place information in an online environment (e.g. job postings, policies postings) and e-learning was seen as logical extension of those e-initiatives. With over 1,000 management and supervisory staff, CBC viewed e-learning as a powerful tool for ensuring the development and delivery of training that was ubiquitous, time effective and cost efficient. While CBC had mixed results in the use of e-learning, it was examining some significant business requirements where e-learning could provide a potential solution. However, CBC lacked knowledge of e-learning issues relative to the organization, including how to implement e-learning and what issues the corporation needed to face in order to successfully implement and ensure adoption of e-learning. Having recognized this, the corporation sought an external solutions provider with this expertise to provide the appropriate guidance to ensure success in implementation and adoption, as well as in selecting the best candidate(s) for pilot implementation.

The Solution

FKA Consulting, anda technology alliance partner, conducted an e-Learning Readiness Assessment consisting of:

• interviews with key stakeholders, training primes from within each Division, and Union representatives
• a technical infrastructure review to understand potential technical impediments to the implementation of e-learning at CBC
• interviews with e-initiative primes from within each Division
• interviews to understand each of the candidate Pilot projects
• a User Skills Assessment with a focus on the Pilot project user groups

All culminated in a comprehensive e-Learning Readiness Assessment outlining results and recommendations for future e-learning initiatives.

The Results

By engaging the services of e-learning solutions team in conducting the e-Learning Needs Assessment, CBC adopted an e-Learning implementation plan that allowed them to move to the next step of implementing an e-Learning program.