Upgrade Needed: From Sixty Hours of Siloed Content to an Engaging E-learning Course
UNC Business Essentials is an online certificate program, developed by and offered through UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School to give students and graduates with non-business majors or degrees the opportunity to learn key business principles.
The problem faced by UNC: Original Business Essentials lesson components were built in the proprietary and outdated BrainHoney/Agilix eXtensible Learning Infrastructure and needed to be recreated in a current “off-the-shelf” software.
The Business Essentials program featured six course modules, totalling approximately 60 hours of asynchronous content delivered in a variety of formats including narrated slide decks, tabbed topics, PDFs and self-grading tests. To further complicate the logistics of the course, this content was housed in two distinct silos:
- 40 quizzes with 5-10 questions each and five exams with 20 questions each. Questions were standard self-graded options of multiple-choice, matching, and T/F question types.
- UNC Staff punchlist with a number of edits, including updates, spelling, grammar and formatting errors throughout.
UNC Business Essentials needed to upgrade this content, making updates of all sizes along the way, from fixing small grammatical errors to re-creating learning objects using a more user-focused, pedagogically sound learning technology. Not only did they need the upgrade, but they needed it yesterday: They had a hard live date, with a public release for the updated version tentatively set for January 5, 2015.
The Verified Solution
Verified Studios presented a detailed timeline and project plan which included weekly meetings with UNC. We adhered tightly to this plan, and the project was delivered on time and without overruns, despite a growth in scope during the seven weeks of work — there was a change in video presentation software; there was a customized video intro, the need to edit existing videos as well as an additional module addendum — and some minor obstacles in fulfillment of the exact one-for-one copy desired due to the clients’ learning curve for the new LMS. We successfully migrated all program content to Canvas, an LMS that was deemed the best fit for the program’s needs, as well as redesigned learning objects in Captivate, an accessibility-focused elearning technology.
The Results
The client speaks best to the results: “I think I speak for Kip when I thank the team there for a great job,” Mike Cain of UNC stated on Verified Studios and this project. “We appreciate all of the hard work and consider it a success. It was definitely a productive experience from my point of view and hopefully not the last time we get to work with you guys.”
