MyKnowledgeMap

Values into Action

An interactive training course created by MyKnowledgeMap has been helping employees at Manchester City Council (MCC) to improve their understanding of the Council’s Corporate Values.

The course is part of MCC’s training package for its employees. It aims to teach learners about the values and vision of MCC, asking them to think about their own experiences and evaluate their own ideas and values within MCC’s system of corporate values.

The existing "Values into Action" course offered by the Council was an inflexible, text-based course, taught in a seminar or classroom context. It was expensive to implement, requiring trainers to host sessions, and was logistically complicated to arrange, with such a wide range of employees in a wide range of jobs and locations. This course, available only to certain employees, has now been transformed by MyKnowledgeMap into an online course accessible to all.

MyKnowledgeMap faced a number of challenges throughout the project. The course produced needed to be cost-effective for the Council to implement, engaging to all employees at all levels in a wide range of work and usable by all employees, whether working in an office, out in the community, or elsewhere. The result is an engaging, online “Values into Action” course, designed to work within Manchester City Council’s VLE, which covers the Council’s five main areas: pride in our city, community focused, people focused, responsive and accountable and valuing our employees.

Using a range of text, interactive activities and video, “Values into Action” introduces learners to the vision, mission, objectives and values most important to the Council. As they work through the course, employees are encouraged to take more pride in Manchester as a city, Manchester as a council and their own work as part of the council, and of the city.

In transferring the course from tutor-led workshops to an online Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), employees at the Council can now fit the learning into their working schedule, rather than having to take time out. Staff can dip in and out of the learning, fitting it around the demands of their working and personal lives, returning to it as often as they like. Because the course runs within the Council’s VLE, learners’ progress can be tracked throughout.

The VLE MyKnowledgeMap constructed for Manchester was built to our own VLE Standard, a version of which was highly successful with Leeds City Council. It offers an adaptable system of training, with facilities for creating a core training package that can be added to or subtracted from very easily.

The VLE also allows the Council to gather and collate employees’ opinions and attitudes, which can be given easily and anonymously through the course. Supervisors are able to oversee the learners online, and ensure that the course profile fits each individual learner, according to their particular training needs, rather than having just one size that must fit all. The online system also enables supervisors to track the progress of each learner and to gain an instant overall picture of how the training programme is progressing at any time.