The new short course platform is alive!
First thing you might ask is ‘What is a short course?’. Well, these are courses that enable learners around the world to gain a new skills, expand their interests in a topic, or fulfil professional development needs.
Secondly, go have a look at the shiny new UoE developed short courses website that allows you to browse, view details on a course, register, pay (if costed), sign up to mailing lists, receive automated comms on the course and access course material via a dedicated VLE/LMS or whatever letters you like to call an online learning platform (it can do more but I don’t want to spoil the fun).
3 years of my life have been dedicated to launching this set of services and its been a roller coaster. but for today lets briefly talk about the set of service that make up the short course platform. This blog won’t cover all the amazing work done by colleagues for course design, branding, marketing etc but will discuss the services (platforms) that make up the short course platform.
The background (always important to tell the back story)
Short courses are offered by various schools across the institution and have been managed and taught via numerous platforms and usually involved a lot of disjointed workflows for learners, teacher and administrators. Short courses didn’t have a dedicated service, we had a gap in the digital eco-system and learners were managed in silo via over complicated workflows and taught on platforms that maybe shouldn’t have been used or weren’t the best for delivering or supporting learning.
Quite a conundrum but not a new one to many of us. Start the business analysis, market analysis, funding applications, procurement and contract sign off (I skipped a lot of steps but that’s another blog) and we get to the fun stuff, implementation.
The services (get ready for learning technology bingo)
The obvious ones are a Virtual learning environment so we can facilitate online, hybrid, and in person teaching and learning. The university loves collecting VLEs and at one point I think we had completed the sticker album and had a few swaps available (mostly Moodles). An early decision was to consider a standalone VLE that would separate learners and students and for an institution that has spent years consolidating VLEs this was the first big decision.
It was clear looking at the options this would be more beneficial technically and practically. Technically VLEs all share very similar elements and for short courses we would being use a subset of the tools available but we needed a reliable and stable platform that could support us as the service grew.
Practically we wanted learners to create and manage their own accounts which also reduces the admin burden on courses who may have been managing users manually. Splitting the audience allowed us more flexibility to offer a tailored learning experience to learners but (and its a biggie) we were very wary that we would be introducing a new platform which teachers and administrators would need to learn. This comes back to my initial point VLEs under the hood do have similarities and we understood the risk. We implemented Canvas by Instructure.
We also needed a shopfront which would be a multifaceted tool (the swiz army knife of the overall service) that included (deep breathe):
- an online tool to advertise the courses
- a payment integration
- course management tool
- order management
- user management
- access to all the data
- all had to be accessible and compliant
I won’t list anymore but you hopefully get the gist and understand it was an very important part of the jigsaw. Internally we have referred to this platform as the user, course, order content management system (it rolls of the tongue). Looking around we didn’t have anything in house that could do the above so we again did the business analysis, market analysis, spoke to some great institutions to understand products available. We implemented a Eduframe by Drieam which is used by a few other UK Universities.
Eduframe did come with a WordPress based website however my development colleagues flagged concerns (they have been burned by WordPress a few times). We then looked at Drupal (which is used for the University website) however again it didn’t meet are long list of requirements. So we plonked for developing a bespoke website using the next,js framework. That will be its own blog like all the other services discussed in this post but a big thank you to Andrew Millington for all his support and advise to get the website off the ground.
What about data! We love data so needed to ensure we could access all the data to allow for pretty visuals to be created and large numbers to be shared on professional media channels. Eduframe has as set of APIs that have allowed us to a Power BI App (they have their own app but we love developing stuff), Canvas has in product analytics and Canvas Data 2 and we use GA4 for web analytics. Its alot of data.
So how do staff access the platform without needing a separate login or going through a long and convoluted process to get access to the platform? We created a teacher admin app using the Eduframe APIs that syncs with the central user management system. This allows admins to enable access to the short course platform with the assurance that when staff leave accounts are updated. Staff login using their UoE account so don’t need to find that bit of paper with a password (I am joking…).
So, to summarise the below are the key services that make up the short course platform.
- Virtual learning environment
- User, course, order content management system
- Bespoke website using the next,js framework
- Data reporting tools
- Teacher admin app
This list does not cover the payment integrations, the numerous integrations we have with tools in canvas and the numerous workflows required to support courses (book, apply, private, waiting lists etc) but hopefully it provides an overview of the services we have implemented that allow us to successfully support and manage the short course platform at scale.
So on reflection 3 years ago I was blissfully paddle boarding on Loch Ness not knowing what was lurking beneath, bit like the implementation of any new service.
