The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) is the largest cultural and sporting In order to reach and support this organisation in Ireland with a network of dispersed membership, the GAA took the more than 2,300 clubs and in excess of decision to implement an education portal 500,000 members. which would provide role based learning

opportunities, accreditation as well as It is celebrated as one of the great information and resources which would amateur sporting associations in the be publicly available. In 2011 they world. The GAA is a volunteer led, awarded the contract to Enovation community based organisation that Solutions following an open tender promotes Gaelic games (such as hurling competition. Enovation were a perfect fit and Gaelic football), culture and lifelong to the GAA requirements given their participation. It is part of the Irish experience in the education sector and consciousness and plays an influential their proven expertise in implementing role in Irish society that extends far complex solutions comprising integrated beyond these basic aims. open source products and interfaces to third party systems.

Given the organisation’s size and scope of influence there are many key roles that require continuous support and development, from coaches to referees to administrators and of course the players.

In essence these groups are Communities of Practice with shared concerns and passions and learn through their interaction with each other.

[email protected] | www.enovation.ie

[email protected] | www.enovationsolutions.fr

Enovation’s proposal was to implement As this was the first foray by the GAA into the solution using a fully integrated set of a complex eLearning project of this proven open source tools. nature, Enovation applied its’ agile software development methodology to The Learning Portal was implemented drive an iterative analysis and prototyping using the Drupal content management phase to arrive at the final project scope. system. This gave the GAA an opportunity Once this phase was complete and the to customise the look and feel of the technical specification agreed the project learning portal leading to a more engaging development was initiated. Enovation user experience than could be achieved implemented a workflow and notification using a LMS on its own. process within a new Moodle block that The learning management aspects of the handled the interactions with certification learning portal were implemented using bodies and ensured all the correct Moodle. Moodle manages courses and authorisations were in place before new learning material delivery and learner courses were opened for enrolment. assessment. To allow members to store accreditation an ePortfolio was also The learning portal is to have publicly integrated into the learning portal. The available training elements with a strong technology used to do this was Mahara. emphasis on multi-media content. With in excess of 500,000 members the user base was potentially huge. Enovation have put in place a streaming server alongside a high availability hosting infrastructure with failover capability to a separate data centre.

Following the successful completion of user acceptance test the GAA are planning a soft launch of the portal in late 2012. [email protected] | www.enovation.ie

[email protected] | www.enovationsolutions.fr