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Canada Soccer rebuilt its coach education as blended learning

In-person coach workshops became a bilingual blended program sold through an online store. Training time fell by half or more, and revenue grew 733% in three years.

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Interactive Canada Soccer Player Pathway chart with each development stage as a selectable image
  • 733%

    increase in revenue in three years, from $60,000 to $500,000

  • 50%

    reduction in training time, from about 18 hours to 4 to 9 hours per learner

  • 32,000+

    members registered for and bought training

About Canada Soccer

Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Award badge: Learning and Development, Gold, 2024

2024 Brandon Hall Group Gold: Best Blended Learning

Canada Soccer is the official governing body for soccer in Canada. It serves about 1,200 clubs in every province and territory, with one million registered active participants.

Coaches and referees receive their training from Canada Soccer, and more than 32,000 take part nationwide. All training is offered in both official languages.

Training built for the pitch had to move online

Canada Soccer's coach training was designed the way the game is played: live, in person and on the pitch. Coaches valued the individual instruction and the relationships it built, but delivering it coast to coast meant heavy costs for scheduling, travel and tracking who had done what.

When COVID restrictions arrived, the training moved to webinars and narrated videos in three weeks. Some pieces worked, others did not translate to a virtual setting, and webinars brought their own accessibility problems for coaches with widely varying experience of technology.

Rather than wait to return to the old model, Canada Soccer chose to redesign the program with Neovation.

How the program was built

  • A blended learning stream

    Neovation worked with Canada Soccer's subject matter experts to map a blended approach and built five custom eLearning courses. Each stream starts with the foundational course Coaching Soccer in Canada, continues with a course for the age and stage of the players, and ends with a practical workshop delivered locally.

  • Courses designed for eLearning

    Instructional designers, writers and eLearning developers reworked the workshop material into clear, consistent templated layouts that learners can navigate easily.

  • Local coaches deliver the workshops

    Experienced coaches in each community deliver the on-field workshops, which keeps the local connection members valued. Close consultation with provincial and territorial member associations earned their buy-in.

  • Delivery through SmarterU LMS

    SmarterU was configured with learning plans for four streams: Active Start, FUNdamentals, Learn to Train and Soccer for Life. Members register and buy their stream in Canada Soccer's online store, and their learning accounts are created instantly.

  • Tracking and support

    SmarterU tracks each element of the learning path, from overall completions down to an individual learner, club, province or territory. Neovation provides end-user support, with chat on each learner's dashboard.

Inside the course

  • Interactive Canada Soccer Player Pathway chart with each development stage as a selectable image
    The Canada Soccer Player Pathway
  • Practice session plan laid out on a soccer field diagram, with activities and water breaks
    A practice session plan on a field diagram
  • Scenario question in which a parent asks a coach why practice is not teaching skills, with two responses to choose from
    A scenario question for coaches
  • Drag-and-drop check matching the four workshops to players' age groups
    Matching each workshop to its age group
  • Key takeaways screen listing what coaches should remember, beside a photo of a coach
    Key takeaways at the end of a course

  • Project goals

    • Create scalable training that keeps the community and culture of the in-person program
    • Cut the cost and administration of scheduling, travel and tracking
    • Let coaches start online right away and practice their skills locally

  • Challenges

    • A training program designed for live, on-field delivery
    • COVID restrictions that forced a sudden move to webinars
    • Coaches with widely varying experience of technology
    • Winning buy-in from coach educators to deliver the workshops locally

The result

The blended program cut training time per learner from about 18 hours to 4 to 9 hours, depending on the stream, and learner satisfaction improved. Revenue grew from $60,000 to $500,000 in three years, and more than 32,000 members have registered for and bought training.

Members register and start right away, with no wait to be scheduled and no long trips. Reconciliation with the provinces and territories no longer involves paperwork, and the hours once spent creating users and assigning training now go to member services.

What Canada Soccer says

  • The Neovation team put the eLearning courses into readable, bite-sized pieces where we didn’t lose the content or the intent of what we had. The result was a consistent look from course to course, from section to section. It was critical that the language was clean and very concise. What the Neovation team came up with was just outstanding.

    Jim Loughlin, Manager of Coach Education, Instructional Design and Content Development, Canada Soccer

  • Types of interactivity

    • Interactive images
    • Scenario questions
    • Drag-and-drop checks
    • Embedded knowledge checks
    • Bilingual content

  • Where the content started

    Existing in-person workshop material, and the lessons learned from delivering it by webinar.

How can we help with a program like this?

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