Santiago e-learning (e-Santiago)

The case

Santiago de Compostela City Council, e-learning service: a solution/an answer for its employees and for the Council itself with benefits for the city too.

The problem

The City Council discovered, after a study of general needs, a lack of motivation for the civil servants to follow the continuing education programs designed by the department of personnel without giving the opportunity to decide the kind of courses they would take. Thus the courses didn't have the minimum number of attendants,  the resources were spent without any beneficial results and the continuing education didn't have an impact on the local City Council.

The solution found

First of all the City Council started  negotiations with all parties  involved: city councilor, chiefs of departments, unions, civil servants' representatives. This period of negotiations gave the opportunity to build a list of continuing education needs and demands the civil servants have in their posts and to create  a complete horizontal career path  in order  to give them the possibility of well regulated promotions always respecting  the basic principles of merit and equality of opportunities.

The project itself, with most of its courses online, offers also other benefits that add value to the service offered, which is why most of the courses were designed to be offered on an online platform.

The impact

We are experiencing a double impact. First of all the solution found has an encouraging effect on the civil servants that consider attending the courses and completing them useful for two reasons: to improve their skills and also to be candidates for promotion following paths previously designed and approved by all. Moreover the local administration can receive benefit from having civil servants that are better trained and more motivated to follow the courses.

The benefits

For the employee:

• A better balance between work, leisure and family time.
• The employee can choose from a broader variety of courses.
• The employee has more freedom to distribute the time needed to complete the training sessions.
• More professional retraining and more promotions.
• More digital literacy.

For the public administration:

• Economization of time the civil servants spend during training in the City Council.
• Economization of materials and resources used during the courses.
• More efficiency and effectiveness aa well as benefits received by interoperability.
•  Employees more implicated in the administration are more motivated to their works.
• A clearer and fairer selection of promotion criteria designed and published in the City Council.
• The administration can measure, evaluate and account the educational actions for the employees.

The results

Santiago City Council is a leading city in the development of the Horizontal Career Path in local public administrations in Spain.  An added value must also be taken into account for the fact that the majority of the courses have an on-line execution, giving additional benefits.

An increasing number of employees are attending and receiving the benefits of the courses. The employees feel more involved in the decisions, what makes closer the political authorities, unions and employees closer.

The City Council has been able to fulfill the main objective of the platform: make universally available the access to training sessions.

Policy Context

EU policy

The Lisbon strategy aims at making Europe the most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion. With this objective it  is of a great importance to use ICT. , This project of the City Council aims at an improvement of the use of new technologies by the staff, acquired through the courses made possible via computers that will give the employees a promotion in their professional careers, and  contribute to their digital literacy.

Within the framework of the Lisbon Strategy we can also take into account that the public administration is a key lever for strategy delivery. Thus it is necessary to put the public management practices and innovations in administration in line with the context of the particular strategy. Public administration is the largest single industry in Europe, so it is of a great relevance for all member states to implement ICT in administrations. This os actually the objective desired  by the project implemented in the City Council. Production and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) are a key point to modernize public administrations. This modernization can reduce costs, improve execution of processes, increase efficiency and reduce burdens, both for citizens and for civil servants, in addition to the administration itself.

National Policies

In Spain, through the Avanza Plan, a great part of the town councils has started to work with e-administration strategies. This Plan has been a first step for local administrations in Spain regarding information and communication technologies and has spent more than four hundred millions euros to modernize public services and to provide with infrastructures the local entities in the country. With this effort, cities like Santiago de Compostela were also able, to offer the citizens a broad range of public services online. The third step is the one in which we are today, give to the public servants new opportunities of training and promotion of their careers through a more equal, efficient and effective system which allows the employees to learn not only the contents of the course but also to be more comfortable and experienced with a computer and its programs.

City Council Strategy

A new legal framework was created which was adopted by the City Council: the new Spanish Labor Code. This Code develops a model of professional career that allows the City Council to start internal promotion system. Once  the civil servants showed that they were scarcely motivated to follow continuing education for different reasons: lack of an offer of courses according to their needs, lack of space in the rooms the City Council could provide for training, lack of agreement among the political branch of the council and the union on how to design the courses required for promotion and other problems that showed a total disagreement with the previous policy in the town council regarding the training and promotion of the staff; all the parts sat together to design a new strategy.

The Council is not only for designing a complete horizontal career path for each professional step, but also for motivating the employees to follow the courses. Once the courses decided, a solution was sought for in order to facilitate the conciliation of the courses with work and family, to provide the courses for a great number of employees and to filfill the need of reducing costs for the administration but at the same time increasing the level of the training. Those were the main reasons that led to the implementation of an online training system in the City Council in order to solve existing problems and prevent the future ones, in line with new times and with EU and national policies. The main objective was the professionalization of the public administration following more efficient criteria.

Description of target users and groups

The main objective of the virtual training platform is to provide, to all  employees working for the City Council, who have a web connection,  access to online courses. Those who haven't the possibility of doing so outside working hours since they lack the required infrastructure would have the possibility to follow the courses during the first hour and a half of each working day.

Actually almost nine hundred employees work in the City Council, with different contracts, different background, different professional categories and other circumstances that make them have different needs of training, always in the context of respect to the equality of opportunities and merit principles.

Today, this new platform will be put at the service of almost six hundred civil servants or contractually employed staff. It will constitute a tool to break the time and distance limits, to improve the effectiveness of the learning, to facilitate the immediate access to great activities of knowledge. The virtual areas also improve the communication among them, making the educational actions taken by the Council more collaborative and social.

Nowadays, this target group  benefits from a wider offer of courses for continuous training and a bigger timetable available to follow the lessons, a fact that  increases the motivation of the target group to register and complete the courses and the educational paths that take them towards the next level in the designed scale.

The approved agreement defines a model of career that entails a promotion of financial nature for those who prove experience trough the required continued five year period  at one  level or grade. In addition, the promotion will be granted after accreditation  of training, which must be followed in a compulsory way through online system. This  allows the employee to follow a formative path previously defined in the training plan and then will ask for a positive evaluation. Finally, the civil servant that applies for promotion will be submitted to a yearly performance evaluation, based on the agreed standards. The main aim of this promotion system is to give private or business criteria to the public administration for a better efficiency in the employee's performance in the administration.

The offer of the courses to the users will follow the designed path according to the professional groups and grades that were identified following the regional regulations. There are five professional groups (vertical career) that take into account the level of studies reached to give access to each of them; and, 5 grades within each of the groups (horizontal career) in which the employee must spend  at least 5 years before gaining entry to the next one.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

The fact that civil servants were since the beginning, part in the decision-making process together with the participation of the union and the political parties of the Council was of great importance in this process; for first time the agreement was approved by all the parties who work in the City Council, after an enriching debate.

The decision-making process and the coordination of the initiative are internally managed by the City Council. The fact of internal management of the initiative has a positive impact on the Council because the employees in charge of the Departments of Personnel and Information Technologies feel involved in the initiative and make a big effort to have it well developed. The fact that the staff of the Council feels this project is part of them also helps to the adequate management of the initiative also helps because of their initial involvement in the initiative.

Once the courses are defined with the contribution of the employees, the City Council hires a private company to offer the contents and the materials to the students, evaluate the attendance and the results acquired and also put at their service a number of human and material resources.

The human resources include tutors specialized in the subject in addition to  the lessons, who to answer the students' questions in the discussion groups through the mail tool. The tutor can be reached by fax, electronic mail, phone and ordinary post. The materials offered by the company include: a specially designed pack of tools to be taught under online training. Together with the pack of materials the student receives a document with the objectives and contents of the course; a number of activities to be developed during the implementation of the course; a student guide in which all the aspects that the student must know before starting the course are presented: a letter of introduction to the training session, the name of the tutor assigned to the student, tutor availability for doubts answering, schedule of the course, the methodology followed during the course, evaluation system, administrative documents that he will be required to deliver.

We also must highlight that the platform uses free and open source software. Working with this software allows the Council to avoid costs for the design of the platform and also follow the international e-learning standards and be able to share or move to a different provider if necessary. Moodle is internationally recognized as a tool for the creation of courses characterized by its commodity in the use of the platform, for organizers and for students, and for the rich interaction it offers.

The following aspects are directly and specifically solved through the virtual platform:

• Administrative management by the City Council: inscription, personal profiles, admission, results. The students don't need a paper for the inscription; everything can be done through the platform;
• Access to contents: multimedia content, .pdf or .doc formats;
•  Evaluation and self-evaluation of knowledge: questionnaires, practical cases, tasks;
• Control and recording of number of accesses, time of use, exit and access to objects. This facilitates the evaluation.
• Asynchronous communication. Through the tool of the internal mail, this allows the communication in different ways: teacher-student and also student-student.
• Synchronous communication: Made within the instantaneous communication tool of the chat room.

 

The virtual platform offers different functions:

• The structuring of the contents of the virtual learning environment that substitute or complement the real ones. This is made following the conception of the learning objects. The idea is that the learning objects allow, through their combination and interaction, to create the required support to get the proposed objectives of collaboration and participation facing the main problems that were found in the present courses, the lack of elements of motivation and effort;
• The use of an instructional method that facilitates the learning of the student. To this objective, the platform provides the student with the necessary tools to get an optimum use of the training: the mail, the chat room, the discussion groups and the activities organized by the company.

 

The company is in charge of the management of the courses and for that, defines the virtual learning environment and the resources (human and material) that will be used in the training action, for each course the following is designed:

• the period of time;
• The format in which the contents of the course will be delivered;
• The activities that will be implemented;
• The evaluation and self-evaluation tools;
• Recording and a complete monitoring of the user entrance and activities;
• Two ways of communication, synchronous, a chat room; and asynchronous, the internal and external mail.

 

The key elements of the initiative are:

• The double impact on the employee and in the public administration.
• The innovation: we link the professional career horizontal path with the online formation to the employee with the advantages tha aret offered.
• The possibility of offer a new service in the City Council that was not being implemented till now.
• The multiple advantages the platform offer: to the civil servants (saving of time, conciliation, increasing of motivation and of formation) and to the public administration (employees better trained and increasing of the digital literacy in the staff, more motivated employees, less burden of resources used, reduction of costs).

Technology solution

In architectural terms, the platform is developed in Moodle. Moodle is a web application that can be carried out without any modifications in Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X, Netware and other systems that are able to support PHP, including the great majority of web hosting providers.

The data managed by this application are kept in a unique relational database SQL that makes total use of abstraction of database in order for  the installers to choose among the different types of database servers (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL that are the two database managers supported by the City Council of Santiago de Compostela).

Moodle allows us to work under international e-learning standards as the SCORM. This is intended to be able to use and reuse the formative units and contents with a total independency from the platform that is being used at present.

The platform design is oriented to objects. We can define object as a number of data and programs that have structure and form part of an organization. These objects, are digital entities, in general of a limited size, designed to be delivered trough internet, making, therefore, access to them simultaneously and by a number of users, easier. Each learning object is created to be autonomous and each of the objects can also include within its structure other objects.

From a pedagogical aspect, the design of this platform includes a constructive and constructivist approach of  education, stressing the fact that students (and not only the teachers) can contribute to the educational experience in a number of different ways.

Objects supported by the platform:

• Task: It can assign to the pupils tasks or not. The students can send their tasks in any format (MS Office, PDF, image, a/v, etc)
• Chat room: The chat allows real time communication among the students.
• Discussion groups: The contributions in the different groups offer the opportunity of an asynchronous exchange of the participants in the group about a shared issue. The participation in the groups can be by itself a complete part of the learning experience, it also can help the students to clarify doubts and to increase and improve its comprehension of the subject.
• Questionnaire: This object gives the opportunity of including questionnaires; the questionnaires can have true-false type questions, multiple-choice questions, short answers, association questions, random questions, numerical questions, questions inserted into the text and with a graphic if the designer of the questionnaire wants that.
•  Mail: Mail application facilitates teacher-student and student-student communication.
• Activities: The teacher can propose to the students all kind of activities or exercises like practical cases or long questions to be developed.
• Multimedia content: This object allows the designer or the teacher to upload in the platform explanatory videos with didactic material of different contents.
•  Links: this is a virtual space formed by links to other webs that allow the student to find useful information regarding the subject object of the course, and other web pages where books, documents, articles and other materials can be found.

Technology choice: Standards-based technology, Mainly (or only) open standards, Open source software

Main results, benefits and impacts

The main results

Santiago City Council is a leading city in the development of the Horizontal Career Path in local public administrations in Spain. In Spain, after the publication of the new Labor Code, were approved some improvements for the employees in the administration. With the negotiation and putting into practice of the new Labor Code, the city of Santiago is one of the first cities to implement it.

Another result that we have to mention as added value is the fact that most of the courses for the promotions have an on-line execution, giving additional benefits, both to the employees and to the public administration. An increasing number of employees are attending and receiving online courses. Employees feel more involved in the decisions, which brings  closer the political authorities, the unions and staff.

The City Council has fulfilled the main objective of the platform: make universally available the access to training. The difficulties in order to conciliate work and family can be overcome with the virtual platform, making more employees interested in the courses, being more motivated and presenting better results in attendance and also of completion of the actions.

The main innovation attached is the fact that in Santiago Council online courses were directly linked to the horizontal promotion in the professional career, what makes easier the evaluation for the promotion and the attendance to the courses for the employees. There is also a path previously designed, well-known by everyone and with recognized and standardized systems of development and evaluation.

With the use of the platform by the employees and the management of it by the own administration, the Council can evaluate almost immediately the training the staff is receiving. Before that, the promotion was only decided by merit criteria but the continuous education was not considered because there was not homologated. Today, there are designed paths that the employees must complete and with good results.

 

The benefits

The virtual platform offers the following benefits:

• Overcoming of the barriers of time and distance:

• E-learning training increases the access to educational or professional training to workers that, for geographical reasons, disabilities or timetable incompatibility, don't have an easy access to on site training;
• The platform doesn't require any software installation or additional support.;
• The course can be followed any time and any location, even offline with a previous download of the course content;

• Costs reduction: in terms of time, economic and ecological savings.
•  Improvement in the effectiveness of the learning:

• It helps to reduce the time the employee needs to reach a competitiveness level and to keep this level;
• The e-learning focuses in the results attached, not in the time.

• Personalization of the tasks of learning:

• The user can have a control over the process, and also have the responsibility over its own learning;
• The user can have an easy access to all the contents of the course;

• A more collaborative and social formation offered to the employee:

• The virtual platform connects the users and gives them the opportunity of exchange comments and information;
• The platform promotes the development of social, and team capacities and abilities through the social interaction.

• A database of knowledge easy to reach and use:

• There are at user disposal a great number of knowledge activities and theycan be reached immediately;
• The contents can be updated daily.
• It provides the users with immediate expertise on the subject..

• A more participative tool:

• Since human capital became one of the main actives in companies, training and continuous education are tasks that must be dealt with during the working lifetime of the employee.

• A tool to measure, evaluate and account:

• A quick access to the following data: user statistics (entries, staying time, activities developed, activities finished, questionnaires solved, results) and also related to the tutor.
• Quality and satisfaction user questionnaires available.

 

Specially referred to the stakeholders:

 

For the employee:

 

• A better balance between work, leisure and family time;
• The employee can choose from a broader variety of courses and can distribute the time needed to complete the training;
•  More professional retraining, more promotions and more digital literacy;

 

For the public administration:

• Economization of the time the civil servants devote to the training in the City Council and in materials and resources allocated to the courses.
• More efficiency and effectiveness and benefits received by interoperability;
• Employees more implicated in the administration of the council being thus  motivated to work;
• A clearer and fairer selection criteria designed and published for promotions in the City Council;
• The administration can measure, evaluate and account the formative actions taught to the employees;
• The courses can be reused and the contents can be kept by the student in order to apply them when needed during the job.

 

The impacts

We are experiencing a double impact. First of all the solution found has a encouraging effect on the civil servants that find it more useful to attend the courses and complete them for two reasons: to improve their skills and also to opt for promotion following the paths previously designed and approved by all. Secondly, the local administration can receive benefits of having civil servants better trained and more motivated to follow the courses.

Track record of sharing

The system implemented in the Santiago City Council and the contents of the courses are designed to be easily shared with other institutions, especially the for local entities of public administration which share same concerns about the employees' continuous education and that need to adapt the training system in the Council to new regulations and to new demands coming from the staff.

The fact that the technological solution implemented is based in a free open software that can be carried out without any modification in Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X, Netware and other systems that are able of support PHP, including the great majority of web hosting providers, makes it  more user friendly and easy to share.

Moreover, the contents are being kept in standard formats that can be easily reused by other institutions. The data managed by this application are kept in a unique relational database SQL that makes total use of abstraction of database in order for the installers to choose among the different types of database servers (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL that are the two database managers supported by the City Council of Santiago de Compostela). The system allows us to work under international e-learning standards as the SCORM. This is intended to be able to use and reuse the formative units and contents with a total independency of the platform that is being used at present.

Since evaluation and impact measurement tools have being created and are under use at present, statistics of use, a monitoring of the quality of the courses, satisfaction enquiries and other questionnaires will be used to have a complete report of the use and benefits of the initiative that can be also be used by other institutions in order to decide whether to implement it or not. 

After the representation of the new system to the  media, some institutions of a same background, in direct contact with the city of Santiago as the  leading city in the area, have contacted the city in order to be informed about the platform and its results. We must also highlight that Santiago is member of a lot of local, regional, cross-border, transnational networks of cities. Moreover, Santiago is the capital city of the region of Galicia.

The first courses that are being implemented nowadays were designed to be able to be shared because they are quite general, and could be developed and followed by civil servants that work in most of the local entities in Europe. The following courses have started:

1. Communication in complaints and claims situations. Urbanism Area.
2. Social Abilities. Social Area.
3. Procedures for management of administrative files and archives techniques.
4. Economic and financial management in public administration. General Administration Area.
5. Economic and financial management in public administration.

Lessons learnt

The three main lessons that can be learnt by this initiative are the following:

1. Employee motivation: With the initial idea of involving employees and the labor unions with representatives in the Council in the broad negotiation of the implementation of the new regulation of the National Labor Code in collaboration with personnel departments and politicians since the beginning in the decision-making process; allows the employees to feel more identified with the final decisions approved, which is a key factor in the success of the initiative. A fixed path for promotion and professional development also facilitates the interest of employees in taking part in the courses and in their correct completion.
2. Employee training: The fact of overcoming time and distance barriers, increasing the offer of courses, offering courses adapted to European standards, offering courses to take part actively while interacting with other students, teachers having the opportunity of deciding the activities and choosing the time and activity to start with, allows  more employees to receive the continuous education required in order to be more useful for the post the employee is working in.
3. Administration resources: with employees more motivated and better trained, Public Administrations increase the effectiveness of their entities. The  time, human, economic and ecologic economization  of resources  through this initiative for all entities is also important.

We think that the fact of linking the horizontal promotion of employees to the training and continuous education online received is a good solution for developing, implementing and evaluating the training and recycling of employees without having to allocate a big amount of time and economic resources, making content and procedures easy to share with other public administration.  

Scope: Local (city or municipality)