KNOLL

Creating a busy and continually growing adult education learning platform for students at the KNOLL tax law institute.

Engaging learning experiences for challenging exams

Steuerrechts-Institut KNOLL is a college specialising in adult education for the German tax industry. It offers various types of short and long-term courses to help students prepare for tax exams that will qualify them for roles as tax advisors or tax specialists.

With the subject matter being complex tax law, learning has traditionally involved lots of paperwork, classroom learning and analogue processes. KNOLL was keen to move the heart of its offering in the direction of online learning. It had experimented with Moodle LMS, but its partner provided only limited technical support to deliver learning content via Moodle.

KNOLL wanted to take a more hands-on approach to crafting the type of online learning experiences it wanted for its students. After an extensive consulting process, it identified Totara Learn as the best LMS on which to create the customised, specialised adult education learning platform it needed. KNOLL approached us to deliver that platform.

A thriving online learning community

Our UX designers created a look and feel that is in keeping with the KNOLL brand and closely matches the user experience of its website.

All KNOLL courses are now available on the LMS, including all learning resources, tests and exams. KNOLL has also been able to broaden and improve its offering to students by embracing Totara Learn’s features.

Integrated live streams and webinars are broadcast within the LMS. The live streams are equipped with chat functionality to create a fully interactive experience.

Totara’s forum functionality has helped to create a thriving discussion environment in which students can interact with each other and their teachers. The busy forum has already attracted more than 30,000 posts.

Each student can review their performance in all tests and exams within the LMS using a custom plugin developed by KNOLL. They see a clear breakdown of where every mark was achieved or missed, with visually stimulating colour coding to show progress and areas for improvement.

We developed split-screen functionality for the LMS so that students can view learning resources, quizzes and videos simultaneously. The two or three-column split screen is fully responsive across all devices and helps to replicate offline learning tasks that would otherwise require an incessant switching between multiple browser tabs.

Using Totara’s calendar functionality, KNOLL helps students who are typically working full-time alongside their learning to manage their time. Dates for every exam, live stream, webinar and any other events are added to the calendar. Students can subscribe and integrate the KNOLL calendar with their phones to help them to plan and maintain their work-life balance.

Attracting more students every year

KNOLL has seen its student numbers rise year-on-year every year since launching its Totara Learn LMS. It credits a strong digital product that meets the needs of its students for helping it to achieve this.

The attractiveness of the platform is demonstrated by the hundreds of highly engaged students who regularly interact with the forum, as well as the 500-plus attendees who join KNOLL live streams.

KNOLL can now easily bring its tax law training to students anywhere, at any time and on any device. This gives greater flexibility to students who are balancing full-time employment with demanding professional qualifications.

“When we met Synergy Learning we realised we had found a professional partner who understands our needs and had the ability to bring to life our ideas of what our learning platform should be.”
Philipp Hausser, Chief Digital Officer

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