Intuto Blog

A case study in Maori language learning.

We all saw Covid-19 affecting countries overseas and we all knew that it would eventually reach New Zealand’s shores, but not many believed it would impact New Zealand’s teaching curriculum as quickly and dramatically as it did on March 23rd, when it was announced all schools were closed as at 3pm that day.

When the lockdown happened, I don’t think anybody really knew what to do.  Certainly getting close to your loved ones and staying safe was step one, but after that, how could educators help the community and parents get through the four week (at least) lock down?  

Traditional means of training such as group training often take a long time. It costs a high amount of money and the learning experience might not be the same for everyone. Online training is a quicker and more cost- and time-effective alternative. People can learn and build skills anytime, anywhere.

Having a learning management system can significantly improve the effectiveness and success of online training. E-learning is becoming increasingly popular with medium and large-sized businesses who have their training material well-defined and ready for on-demand learning. Online training can include videos, presentations and documents such as PDF files.

When we started down the path of developing Intuto as a Learning Management System (LMS) that met the specific requirements of the modern SME segment, we started with some ideas, quickly built and tested them and then, based on user feedback, modified the initial platform to meet the real needs of the market. In short, we listened to our customers and released, changed and deleted features from the core idea to meet what they wanted. This was a great approach for the first growth period of the Intuto product and led to some great feature innovation.

As we got more and more customers, we started to have some other challenges - how to manage new developments, how to keep our diverse customers happy and…...eventually speed.

Registrations into courses were growing so fast that in a single month we had the same number of new course registrations as we had had in total for the two years leading up to that month!

I have always enjoyed learning new things, especially in education, so I was very lucky to fall into the perfect role 16 years ago when I came back from my OE.  I started at a very small company with a huge vision, and I have been here ever since! Many of my colleagues from university now work in big organisations with pinball, table tennis and even slides - but I wouldn’t change my career path for anything (well maybe Craig Walker’s role) - because eLearning feels good.

The beginning