Special Olympics World Games

Helping coaches, officials and athletes get up to speed with Special Olympics World Games organisation and events.

A diverse range of learning goals

The Special Olympics World Games is a sporting event that brings together 7,000 athletes with intellectual disabilities to compete across 26 sports.

The 2023 Special Olympics World Games were held in Berlin in June 2023. In the build-up to the games, the Berlin 2023 local organising committee needed an enterprise LMS (learning management system) that would share key training and information with multiple audiences involved in the games, including:

• Technical officials
• Unified Sports^® observers
• Coaches
• Fans

But the LMS would also have a key legacy element. Special Olympics Deutschland — the national federation promoting and organising inclusive sport for people with intellectual disabilities in Germany — wanted to use the LMS in the build-up to Berlin 2023 and beyond to reach educators, coaches and athletes with training, best practices and qualifications.

Between the two organisations, the LMS needed to serve three core purposes for the immediate and future success of the Special Olympics:

• The Special Olympics National Games Berlin 2022
• The Special Olympics World Games Berlin 2023
• The Special Olympics Deutschland Academy

The LMS needed to be:

• Multilingual with learning available in both German and English
• Accessible and intuitive — not least because many of the users would have intellectual disabilities
• An enterprise LMS scalable so that up to 20,000 users would be able to use it simultaneously

Getting Special Olympics World Games on the right track

After exploring the options, the local organising committee and Special Olympics Deutschland decided that Synergy Learning had the best offer to meet both organisations’ requirements.

Using the multi-tenancy feature of the Moodle Workplace enterprise LMS, we created three tenants for the organisations: one for the National Games, one for the World Games and one for the Special Olympics Germany Academy. A smooth registration process — in keeping with Moodle Workplace’s simple, intuitive platform — and the simple user experience we designed made it easy for all users to access  and navigate the site.

We built a scalable hosting platform that was robust enough to easily handle peak demand during the games but also scaled down to support the continuous learning being delivered by Special Olympics Deutschland.

For the games themselves, the local organising committee created, managed and delivered 136 courses to its various different audiences. Moodle’s course copy functionality made it easy to replicate courses with a similar structure without starting from scratch each time. 

Given the large number of courses and the various audiences, we created a clean, intuitive course catalogue to help all users to find the right learning. Marketing spots  — a feature of our Spark LMS theme — meant the organising committee could also promote relevant learning to each learner as they navigated the site. 

Technical officials needed to pass a series of courses to qualify to referee or judge their chosen sport. Similarly, Unified Sports observers completed courses to help them to make and identify fair, accurate and impartial decisions during events.

Coaches were given training on rules and administration of the games. For example, they had to complete a specific course to become eligible to file a protest on behalf of their athletes. 

Berlin 2023’s Fans in the Stands initiative was used to share learning with children who would be attending the games. This included interactive games that introduced young people to the Special Olympics and the World Games with informative content and information on what to expect as a spectator. Moodle’s H5P functionality helped to reach this audience with highly engaging content.

All coaches and officials were assigned safeguarding training to promote a safe and enjoyable games for everyone involved.

This drive towards positive Special Olympics experiences was enhanced by the continuous learning being delivered by the Special Olympics Deutschland Academy. Its courses aimed at educators and coaches cover topics including how to create the best learning experiences for athletes and coaches, how to use easy language in coaching, and public speaking — all targeted at ensuring enjoyable and helpful coaching for athletes with intellectual disabilities.

Special Olympics Deutschland is now starting to create discipline-specific coaching courses for people who want to coach Special Olympics athletes. A swimming coaching course is already available and learning will be rolled out across other sports in the coming months.

In its use of the LMS, Special Olympics Deutschland has been using blended learning, with Moodle Workplace also providing the infrastructure for face-to-face learning that complements the online courses.

Moodle’s badges and certificates are proving to be successful motivators in encouraging coaches and prospective coaches to undertake and complete the relevant qualifications. All of this helps to ensure the consistency and availability of Special Olympics qualifications throughout Germany.

90% completion rate among head coaches

The Berlin 2023 local organising committee was able to meet its goals of delivering comprehensive learning and resources to the various different user groups that it needed to engage. 

The enterprise LMS put in place the infrastructure to ensure that anyone involved in the games was given the information they needed to play their part in creating a fair, safe and secure environment for all participants. It also successfully streamlined the organisers’ efforts to deliver training to large numbers of different types of learners — and it will continue to do so.

Special Olympics Deutschland has hired a new team member specifically to manage its Moodle Workplace platform and oversee the delivery of specialist training to coaches and educators operating in more Special Olympics disciplines.

“The collaboration with Synergy Learning was wonderful. The team was so professional and fully committed to the project. Any questions — and we had a lot — we just contacted them and we had an answer very quickly. They always supported us and helped us to make things happen that we couldn’t make happen by ourselves.”
Dr Kathrin Weber, Education & Science Manager

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