CNED

CNED is a French public institution for education and training under the supervision of the Minister of National Education, Higher Education and Research. Its mission is to provide and promote distance education and training, including through modern communication techniques.

Accessibility, success and social utility are at the heart of their values. Every year, nearly 240,000 people in 163 countries benefit from CNED programs. CNED needed to replace an obsolete solution difficult to maintain, not durable and with limited functional coverage.

As part of the implementation of the “CNED 24/24” strategic plan, CNED was looking for a flexible and evolving LCMS solution (“CEN project”), to put in place the processes and tools enabling the CNED to produce, in an industrial way, structured training contents, broadcast on media and formats adapted to the demand (cross-media approach), so the project has three main objectives:

• Establish an agile and scalable solution adapted to the CNED’s teaching models and make the training offer (services / content) accessible and continuously diffusible in different media and formats (tablet, laptop, ePub3 and printable version); 
• Simplify the editorial process to optimize production processes and reduce costs and production times;
• Support the deployment of the new solution to the various players in the design and manufacture of digital training.

Solution

The main priority was to adapt the standard native template to the different targets: primary and secondary school, high school, university and vocational training.

The pilot phase, involving 4 CNED sites, began in 2015 with the aim of producing contents by the end of the year for a limited number of didactical programs.

The first phase of the process was spent collecting the requirements and more peculiar didactical needs, usability and technical compatibility needs in order to design the best solution both from the pedagogical and from the graphic and ergonomic point of view. Particular attention was paid to the definition of the graphic and communicative style as well as to the choice of the interface also from the user experience point of view and the available functions.

Two different layouts/skins were developed with their own features and the responsiveness was improved for both skins. The specific development and customization requested consisted of:

• Advanced skin development (advanced graphical interface for CNED courses)
• Navigation and menu customization
• Sample layouts development
• Responsive optimization
• Authoring environment simplification (LCMS and Online Editor)

eXact learning solutions “ELS” together with its sister company Lattanzio Learning, has provided and guaranteed a smooth change management with the support in French to several hundred authors spread over the 8 different sites.

While ELS has provided the software solution and its expertise for a suitable implementation and software adaptation to specific CNED requirements, Lattanzio Learning has been managing the project and has coordinated all the training activities for the LCMS users and the day by day support to the authors thanks to a help-desk service active 5 days a week in French. This service includes not only the resolution of technical / educational problems through trouble tickets, but also remote sessions with individual users. The chosen solution has taken into account the overall ambition of CNED to define and implement a centralized system that follows a unified process for learning content development, management, translation and localization, in a super secured environment.

Achievements

The solution met the requirements for both expert users (authors) and for less expert and novices like SMEs – subject matter experts/teachers with the following overall objectives:

• Reduce content production and maintenance costs without reducing, and where possible increasing, the effectiveness of CNED’s learning offer
• Design and deliver a unique learning user experience by integrating the LCMS with any new solution that CNED might decide to include in its learning landscape in the next future.

Today there are almost 300 eXact learning LCMS registered users at CNED with different roles like: content creators, designers, reviewers, administrators, project managers and the plan is to increase this number for new digital content programs to be launched soon and in the next years. CNED authors and content designers after the initial adaptive learning curve, consider the tools stable and today CNED takes full advantage of eXact learning LCMS functionalities and produces more and more qualitative content. CNED has made the decision to migrate to the new software version implemented by ELS, completely redesigned with a dramatic improvement of the user interface for a better user experience, within 2018.