All university and UAB Health System employees will be able to access all training and development courses through a Web portal beginning later this month.
The UAB Faculty & Staff Learning System will enable employees to browse training opportunities, register for classes, track their training histories and more.
“The new Faculty and Staff Learning System will make it more efficient for our employees to take online training courses and register for in-classroom training classes, which is one of the primary goals,” says Pam Burks, executive director of Human Resources.
UAB will be able provide faculty and staff with an array of online training tools and resources 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Employees will be able to take control of their own training and development, and UAB will be able to ensure that state and federal-mandated courses are delivered in a timely manner.
The Health Services Foundation first began using HealthStream in 2003. Since 2007, other members and affiliates of the UAB Health System came on board, including UAB Hospital, Callahan Eye Hospital, VIVA, UAB Health System and UAB Medical West, says Pam Morgan, learning management administrator for the Health Services Foundation. When the campus goes live on the system later this month, HealthStream will be rebranded and called the UAB Faculty & Staff Learning System.
“We want to emphasize to Health System employees that we are not going to a new learning system,” says Morgan. “The current system is going to be integrated enterprisewide and renamed the UAB Faculty & Staff Learning System. The only things that will be different for most employees within the UAB Health System are the name and the Web address. Everything else will remain the same. The only exception is that UAB Medical West will continue to log in to the current site at this time.”
Employees will log into the new system using their Blazer ID credentials. One of the advantages of this is that the system will be able to keep track of training histories in one place, giving employees a complete record of courses they have completed at UAB.
“In the past, employees have had to go to two or three different places to find a history of the classes they have taken,” Burks says. “That made it somewhat difficult and time consuming to track down which courses they had completed.”
Thousands of employees take advantage of training and development courses each year, Burks says, and their course histories will be moved into the new learning management system. So when faculty and staff begin exploring the system later this month, they will be able to view a complete list of courses on their training transcript.
Another advantage of the new learning management system will be the ability to self-register for elective learning courses, in addition to regulatory courses, from a single sign-on access point. Now, if a physician needs to take courses for research-related purposes and regulatory courses to meet state or federal requirements, he or she doesn’t have to go to several different locations. Individuals can search for the course they need and register for it on the new Faculty and Staff Learning System site.
Another feature the new system will provide is the ability to push classes out to specific groups of people.
“If a department has a specific mandatory training need for their employees — like all research assistants and associates need to take a class for regulatory purposes — the class can be pushed out to them, and they will be informed that they need to take it,” Burks says. “To set up a class to be sent out, the department’s system administrator or representative will be able to assist.”
The website for the new UAB Faculty & Staff Learning System will be unveiled later this month. Watch the UAB Reporter and The eReporter for the next update.