20% More Learners: How Australian Training Company Automated Its Way Out of Manual Marking With Open LMS

Learn how an Australian training organization eliminated redundant re-marking, automated learner communications, and increased its learner-to-trainer ratio by 20% with a learning management system built for training providers.

Australian Training Company (ATC) is a medium-sized private registered training organization (RTO) that delivers nationally recognized qualifications under contract to Australian government training programs. Its programs are partially subsidized by the New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory, and Queensland governments, making accredited training more affordable for learners across eastern Australia.

ATC trains across multiple categories, including business, sport and recreation, fitness, education support, agriculture, horticulture, and information technology. Learners complete web-based coursework, a smaller number attend face-to-face classes, and practical assessments are recorded on video and uploaded for a trainer to review and assess. Every one of those pathways runs through a single learning platform, which ATC brands internally as Quest.

In August 2025, ATC began evaluating a move off its incumbent platform, Learnbook, a legacy system managed by Open LMS. ATC ultimately decided to move from Learnbook to the Open LMS platform, and the migration went live in March 2026.

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The Challenge: Manual Work That Scaled With Every Learner

Nothing was broken at Australian Training Company. That’s what made the case for change harder to make, but ultimately more compelling. The organization was delivering training successfully on its legacy system; the problem was that the platform’s capability gaps translated directly into trainer hours, and those hours grew in step with enrollments.

The first gap was learner communication. When a trainer marked a unit as “not yet competent,” the email telling that learner to reattempt their work had to be manually written and sent by the trainer, unit by unit. Across a caseload of learners moving through multiple units at different paces, that added up to a substantial share of a trainer’s week spent on correspondence rather than assessment or teaching.

The second, more expensive gap was quiz marking. If a learner’s quiz attempt came back as “not yet competent” due to two or three incorrect questions, ATC’s legacy LMS required the trainer to re-mark the entire quiz upon resubmission. Every question, including the ones the learner had already answered correctly, had to be re-marked. The marking effort was tied to the length of the assessment rather than to the amount of work the learner had actually redone.

That structural inefficiency capped how many learners a trainer could carry. With ATC’s organizational benchmark for a full-time trainer’s caseload set against how long marking and correspondence actually took, growth in learner numbers meant growth in headcount.

ATC was left with a choice: find the missing functionality within the existing vendor relationship, or go to market. Open LMS confirmed that ATC could move from Learnbook to its proprietary platform at the same price point the training provider was already paying. That removed the commercial objection, and the decision quickly followed.

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The Solution: Automation, Reporting, and a Migration Learners Barely Noticed

ATC’s implementation focused on the specific mechanics that were consuming trainer time, rather than on a wholesale redesign of how the organization delivers training. Four capabilities carried most of the return on investment.

1) Retained Marking on Quiz Reattempts

The change most regularly cited by ATC's trainers as having the greatest positive impact is also the least glamorous. Correct answers now hold their marks when a learner resubmits an assessment, so a trainer reviewing a reattempt marks only the questions the learner actually redid. Repeated across every “not-yet-competent” quiz in every unit across every trainer’s caseload, instructors are saving time and reducing manual labor. It’s the change in LMS capabilities that made the wider business case work.

2) Automated Learner Communication With the Personalized Learning Designer

Open LMS’s exclusive Personalized Learning Designer (PLD) now handles the correspondence ACT’s trainers used to write. Learners are automatically notified when work needs to be reattempted, when a unit is issued, and when a due date approaches. ATC also configured PLD to send monthly progress emails from learners to the people invested in their outcomes—workplace supervisors, schoolteachers, and parents—a communication loop the organization simply did not have the capacity to run manually.

3) GradeMe and Role-Specific Dashboards

The GradeMe plugin gives trainers a single view of the marking queue and an overview of their learners’ progress. Learners get a corresponding view of their own: what’s coming up, where each unit sits, and the start and end dates that govern it. For a cohort that ranges from senior secondary students to learners in their late sixties, this visibility achieves a significant amount of pastoral work on its own.

4) Open Report Engine for Scheduled and Learner-Facing Reporting

ATC uses Open LMS’s Open Reports Engine (ORE) to:

• Build the insights that power its dashboards
• Schedule recurring reports to instructors, supervisors, and parents
• Give learners assessment-task-level reporting

Rather than only seeing whether a unit or course is complete, learners can see every individual assessment task they need to complete and its current status.

The migration itself deserves its own note, because it’s where the RTO expected the most friction and found the least. Every existing learner attended a group induction, delivered as a 15-minute video call at a time slot they chose, where they received their new Open LMS credentials. Because the two platforms use much of the same terminology and put things in similar places, the induction was genuinely all that was required.

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The Results: A 20% Larger Caseload Per Trainer and  Reinvested Marketing Capacity

As a direct result of the time savings achieved by migrating to Open LMS, ATC has increased the number of learners a full-time trainer carries by 20%. This is because trainers no longer reassess successfully completed work or manually write reattempt emails. The increase in learner capacity goes directly to ATC’s bottom line without a corresponding increase in headcount.

The LMS migration has saved the administration team time, which it has redeployed to other areas of the business. Additionally, the organization as a whole has more capacity for marketing. At ATC, trainers do their own recruitment, so returning hours to trainers translates fairly directly into learner acquisition, and the organization has seen an increase in enrollments since the changeover.

Learner feedback consistently singles out the LMS dashboard and the visibility it gives them over upcoming work and unit dates. Among trainers, feedback always lands in the same place: As Trainer Assessor Haley Bennetts puts it, every time the team discusses what has improved since implementing Open LMS, “Everyone agrees: it was worth it for the marking.”

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