eLearning Modernization In Higher Education: How A Large University Succeeded In Engaging Students On-The-Go
How do universities engage students in the 21st century? The answer is fairly obvious; mobile delivery. 92% of American aged 18-29 own a smart phone per the Pew Research Center, and 51% own a tablet [1].
A study by Pearson [2], interviewing 1200 US college students, found that the vast majority of students (84%) agreed that tablets will transform the way college students learn in the future. In addition, 64% of the students surveyed said they use a smartphone at least twice a week for school work. Ultimately, 40% of the students survived said they would like to use mobile technologies more often than they do now for learning.
The execution of mobile delivery, on the other hand, is not as easy of a question.
Creating Mobile eLearning In Higher Education
We recently worked with a large university that was struggling with engaging their learners. The university offers on-campus and online degree programs on 90 campuses to over 800,000 graduate and undergraduate students.
The students have flexible options of on-campus and online programs that allow them to take courses as per their needs. To achieve this, the university uses technology tools to deliver and manage courses.
Traditionally, the university used a proprietary online learning management platform to deliver online courses and manage completion tracking. The online learning management platform also allowed educators of the university to author and publish a course using an inbuilt course authoring tool. This offered an easy and integrated way for the university educators to create, distribute and manage their courses.
To meet the mobile learning demands of the students, the university wanted to upgrade its courses for mobile compatibility. Furthermore, the university wanted to deliver courses independent of the online learning management platform.
Through this approach, the university wanted to host the migrated new format of courses on a different content management system and link the courses through their current learning management platforms
The Challenges
The key challenges faced by the university included:
- The university used a single online learning management platform to author and deliver online courses. Educators used the inbuilt ‘Visual Editor’ tool to create the online courses. The ‘Visual Editor’ within the online learning management platform rendered a huge redundant code base that was becoming difficult to manage with the latest updates.
- Since the online learning management platform was a third party application and a hosted solution, other competitors using the same platform caused an inconvenience to the university over content privacy issues.
- Since the courses were authored within the online learning management platform and hosted within the same platform, the courses were completely dependent on the platform and were not interoperable.
- The current online platform did not offer mobile delivery.
- The university had accumulated a huge volume of courses, nearly 1,000 courses containing 70,000 pages, thus making it a laborious task to migrate the legacy content into a new format.
How We Solved It
Our solution experts determined that the requirements were a good match for our Modernize solution. This solution would ensure that we would be able to properly leverage the university's legacy content, improve the design, correct content inaccuracies, refresh the instructional strategy, and deploy the content in a platform-agnostic format.
Modernize Project Overview
We began the conversion of the university’s legacy eLearning content with a comprehensive content audit to collect of all their courses (near 1,000) into a consolidated location. This was crucial to analyze all of their content. You can read more about analyzing eLearning content for modernization here.
Next, we completed the strategy phase of eLearning modernization by conducting thorough interviews of stakeholders, a careful audit of legacy content, recommendations for a future state design, instructional strategy, and technology formats.
We then built a Prototype and went through rounds of revision to ensure compatibility with the future learning management system environment.
Modernization Development
We then helped the university in implementing a robust content migration workflow process that ensured a ‘Zero’ error rate during migration. The key things to this migration included:
- A pilot batch tested to identify any process improvements needed prior to the full migration lifecycle. This allowed improvements and fixes done right during the pilot phase and thereby eliminating any process gaps and errors thereof.
- Content porting using Dreamweaver templates. These templates were then published to an HTML5 format.
- The HTML5 courses hosted on a separate content management system and linked back to the online learning management platform.
- Strong quality assurance processes integrated with batches of content in the migration process.
- A Service Level Agreement (SLA) driven production lifecycle to ensure maximum ROI.
Key Successes Of The Project
Infopro Learning has over two decades of experience in developing content solutions. We have worked extensively in helping customers keep pace with changing technology landscapes. While we deliver significant value through our innovative use of technologies, our process excellence doubles the value delivered to our customers. Major business benefits delivered to the university included:
- Tested Content Migration Process Framework.
SLA driven content migration helped the customer achieve this seemingly mountainous task within a defined timeline and controlled budgets. - A Cleaner Code Base.
The new HTML course output is better streamlined, easier to use and now had a cleaner code base when compared with the legacy courses. This made it easier to make updates and future amendments. - Automation In Porting.
Dreamweaver templates allow a level of standardized and automated content porting from the legacy environment thereby reducing the error rate typically expected in manual porting. - Platform Independence And Mobile Compatibility.
The resulting HTML5 courses allow the university to host the courses independent of the online learning management platform. These can also be accessed on mobile devices, thereby increasing student enrollment and engagement. - Maximum ROI And Time-To-Result.
Both our batch production processes and SLA driven delivery lifecycle helped deliver the project within defined timelines and assured quality.
Modernize Programs Increase ROI Αnd Engagement
With significant investments in content development, companies need to search for ways to repurpose content across various learning programs. Not only will this increase the ROI, but it will also help increase engagement by modernizing the look and feel of courses to match the changes in learner demographics.
Read the free ebook Modernize For Engagement to see how in 5 steps we modernize content for better engagement and breathe life back into stale content.
Related articles:
1. 3 Reasons Why You Need An eLearning Modernization Strategy
2. The 2 Parts Of A Successful Content Modernization Strategy
3. How The Modernize Solution Transformed A Telecom Giant's Legacy Training Portfolio
4. Free eBook - Modernize For Engagement: 5-Step Guide For Breathing Life Back Into Stale Content