About the City of San Antonio

The City of San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the United States, boasting a large and varied number of city employees. City of San Antonio’s employee training and engagement is focused on creating and delivering the most impactful opportunities for employees to reach career potential. Training and Engagement is a division of Human Resources and uses the online eLearning tool, Totara, to promote and cultivate career development for City employees.

Goals & Challenge

The City of San Antonio was previously using the Totara LMS, but were looking for a higher level of support from their hosting provider. The City of San Antonio began evaluating other Totara vendors and found the support they needed with Open LMS's fully-managed and unlimited support model for Totara.

After deciding to host their Totara installation with Open LMS, a Platinum Totara Partner (and 2018 Global Totara Partner of the Year), the Open LMS Team had to work with an incredibly quick timeline. The City of San Antonio needed to move their site over to Open LMS's environment in just three weeks. As such, they needed a rush job to complete their site transfer and standup before the end of their previous. To make the immediate transfer more digestible for both teams and end users, they decided to replicate their theme and look.

Solutions

Site Migration & Theme Styling

In an effort to transfer their site quickly and keep it as similar as possible to what they had previously, the Open LMS team worked closely with the City of San Antonio to design a theme similar to the one they’d used with their previous host. They selected the OneTopic course format to try and mimic the look of their last theme.

HR Import

Although they were already familiar with HR Import, Open LMS was able to assist the City of San Antonio with this process by providing best practice suggestions that helped improve the process. HR Import allows them to sync their existing employee user base into their new Totara instance, ensuring an easy transition of their employee roster and accompanying user data. This allows City of San Antonio’s employees to immediately begin their training programs as soon as they are hired.

Course Creation

Additionally, Open LMS assisted the City of San Antonio in structuring their course content in a way that would give them the user experience, reporting, and learning outcomes that they desired.

Results & Future Plans

The City of San Antonio was very happy with the quick and efficient implementation Open LMS was able to provide. They were fully migrated and live on Open LMS before the end of their previous contract, helping them to avoid overlapping contracts. The look and feel of their site remained similar enough that there were limited user issues and questions post-migration.

Since their move, the City of San Antonio has not only seen an improvement in workflow, but can confidently rely on to provide immediate support and thoughtful suggestions for improvements.

During the Discovery & Implementation stages, eThink and the City of San Antonio also worked together to plan a Phase 2 of their project, since the initial transfer and stand-up was rushed.

With Open LMS’s help, they plan to add:

• Single Sign On (SSO) using SAML so users are able to gain easy access to any of several related systems with a single ID and password.
• Seminar functionality to enable training managers to create, manage and report on in-person events and incorporate a blended learning strategy in their training.
• Reports for training managers related to learner progress,course completion, and more. They are looking to expand beyond the standard reports in Totara and potentially incorporate an outside reporting tool to add more in-depth reporting capabilities.

With Open LMS’s unlimited support and consultation, the City of San Antonio is confident of the direction of their project and looks forward to continuing to collaborate and find the best way to support and enhance their training efforts during the months and years to come.