1,000+
learners
200+
teams built out in the LMS
611
courses completed in 30 days
Use Case: Internal Training, External Training, Partner Training, Employee Training, Compliance Training, Revenue Enablement Training, Customer Training
Industry: Nonprofit
Products: Litmos LMS, Litmos Content, Litmos Sandbox
Customer Since: 2021
Who is Mission Aviation Fellowship?
Millions of people around the world live in poverty in remote rural areas without access to medical care, education, or opportunity. Geographic barriers such as jungles, mountains, and deserts hamper overland travel and hinder socioeconomic development. In other areas, conflict and discrimination create different types of obstacles and increase suffering.
Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) is a family of international Christian organizations whose mission is to use light aircraft, and other technologies, to bring help, hope, and healing to some of the world’s most isolated communities.
According to MAF, every 5.6 minutes, one of their aircrafts takes off or lands somewhere in the world, to transport people living in remote communities, assist aid and development agencies, or help missions and churches share the love of God.
MAF International oversees programs in Arnhem Land (Australia), Chad, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, South Sudan, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Uganda, and one restricted access nation. Other members of the MAF global family include MAF Canada and MAF US, which also run programs worldwide.
To maintain such a large geographical area with over 1000 learners and stick to their mission of “Serving together to bring help, hope and healing through aviation” MAF needed to invest in their people, and that included training.
Why Litmos?
Before investing in Litmos, MAF had a learning management system (LMS), but few were engaged, and team leaders generally didn’t create their own content. Each trainer had their own PowerPoints and documents, so nothing was cohesive or centralized. One of the biggest motivations to get a new LMS was enhancing the development and growth of every individual at MAF.
MAF started the journey of selecting a new LMS with the following goals in mind:
- Their overall training goal was to invest in people and create a richer learning environment by upskilling staff to keep everyone engaged, motivated, and productive, using their God-given talents every day.
- A significant part of that goal was to get people engaged in eLearning and to monitor training progress across the organization. MAF needed to help the managers get engaging and empowering training directly to their staff. “We think that eLearning courses are assisting to develop our staff in mandatory, professional, and personal training. Before Litmos, we didn’t have a system that was able to track both local and international staff who reside in developing countries where we work,” says Hilda Fyock, Learning and Development Manager at MAF.
With 700 internal learners, 300 external learners, and over 200 teams, MAF looked to Litmos to help automate and simplify their training process, grow engagement, create a learning culture, track formalized training, create content, and cultivate learning communities for a more connected organization. “We chose Litmos because it has many features, is user-friendly for the end user and team admins, and because Litmos has content in addition to the LMS. Everything is in one place,” explains Fyock.
“Since we started training on Litmos around 4 years ago, we have seen over 16,000 courses completed that weren’t directly assigned to our users. Our new users very often complete 30-60 short courses in the first 30 days.”
Success with Litmos
“Litmos has given us the ability to train and track much more in an online way, whereas previously almost all of our training was done face-to-face,” notes Fyock.
MAF currently trains over 1,000 users, including internal and external learners for operations, management, engineering, flight training, HR, finance, IT, communications, and more. They also use Litmos for their organizational standard induction assigned to every user with access to a computer. The organization has also trained a few customers who needed to complete required security training for access to the MAF-owned airfield.
“Since implementing Litmos, we have much higher engagement, as proven by our numbers and the feedback I receive from users and team admins. We have seen 611 courses completed in the last 30 days. Regulations in aviation are becoming stricter every year; and countries who don’t really have civil aviation are now demanding more training be done because of external pressures. Litmos really helps us keep up with the demand,” boasts Fyock.
One area Litmos has really helped MAF thrive is compliance tracking through the integration with their proprietary app, Wingman. “Using the Litmos open API we are able to integrate with Wingman which allows us to know when a pilot has met their training requirements and is current to fly. We basically track the pilot’s license with an end date along with their medical approval, then our Wingman app looks into ‘elevate’ (our Litmos instance) to see if the pilot is ‘current’ to fly, which means the course says ‘complete and compliant’ for the pilot. When Wingman says they are ‘current’ then they can fly,” says Fyock.
The ability to create teams within Litmos and break people down based on what training they need, and also assign them to multiple teams, has also been an important feature for MAF as they currently have an impressive 200 teams. “While we only have 2 account admins, we have 190 team admins. The Roles and Permission features offered by Litmos allow our team admins the ability to assign and track training throughout their team and in turn, the whole organization. We have many teams based on various criteria, For example, one person could be in an induction team to get the learning path, the UK office team for anything related to their location, a department team, and we even have a team that separates those with email addresses and those without. It’s all about assigning the training to different groups. We even have our governance board that makes up a team,” states Fyock.
In addition to the LMS, MAF is also taking advantage of the Litmos Content collections. While they create much of their own content, they look to Litmos Content to help continue developing their people. “While we do use the Litmos Content, a lot of the usage we see is from the individual level. We have team members, especially on our maintenance team, taking the initiative to improve their skills with courses such as PPE Awareness, Fire Safety Awareness, Step Ladder Safety, Fall Protection, Fire Classification Equipment, and more. Since we started training on Litmos around 4 years ago, we have seen over 16,000 courses completed that weren’t directly assigned to our users. Our new users very often complete 30-60 short courses in the first 30 days,” explains Fyock.
“Since implementing Litmos, we have much higher engagement, as proven by our numbers and the feedback I receive from users and team admins. We have seen 611 courses completed in the last 30 days.”
What’s next for Mission Aviation Fellowship and Litmos
As MAF continues to grow and help people all over the world, they need training and their LMS to grow with them. Luckily, due to Litmos’ limitless global scalability, MAF sees clear skies ahead. They hope to add additional MAF groups, which would initiate new teams in elevate (their Litmos instance). “We already have MAF Canada, MAF Suriname, and MAF Finland who have joined us on elevate, and we could add up to 12 more groups,” Fyock notes.
While exploring the idea of adding more groups, MAF will also be expanding with many of their fundraising teams who do funding and recruiting for their operations. This could include up to an additional 200 people. “That training will be quite a bit different because of the content and could include volunteer training,” says Fyock.
“We have three Preferred Training Providers (PTPs) that are flight schools training professional pilots and they create their own training content. Two of these schools already have joined us with using Litmos. All our pilots are ICAO based Commercial licensed pilots, and they must do this training first, and then we have additional flight training that is specific for our type of flying in remote areas, which is more challenging. After the flight school, we track and train line pilot training, do base checks, confirm medical licenses, and in some locations track the issuing of security passes,” continues Fyock.
As MAF continues to excel and grow we look forward to continuing our partnership to support their ongoing success!