Educational Ecosystem
The Project
This project is the overall architecture for a next-generation ecosystem to replace the university’s learning management systems, enrollment processes, and learner support systems. It touched every aspect of the university’s business and every user in their systems. It was a massive multi-year project, and it was being stood up in a university where they had never built software before.
Company: Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU)
Role & Duration: User Experience Architect – Fall 2022- Fall 2023
My role on this team was to map out the strategic vision for every user experience of this ecosystem. Additionally, I filled in as a technical advisor until a technical architect was hired; System analysis, User flows and stories, Sketching, Flow Diagrams, Stakeholder presentations, Wireframing, Visual Design, Prototyping, Technical Advisor
The Challenge
The university used a traditional educational model. Each learner was enrolled, signed up for a specific program, worked the program, and graduated…hopefully. Their current model has some issues:
- Declining Enrollment – Students don’t value degrees as much, especially in light of the skyrocketing costs
- Value – Students didn’t always get credit for their learning, forcing them to redo courses
- Retention – Student dropped out of their programs
- Programs – Course development took too long, was expensive, and difficult to keep updated
- Scaleability – Staff is overburdened so the university is “at capacity”
Constraints
- Greenfield project
- New internal team
- No processes in place
- No deployment team
- No QA team
- Redundant existing systems
- Contract dev team (part-time)
Our Users
This system was intended to replace every operation at the university, so it was for “all users”. We did start off with a specific subset of users to test the end-to-end capabilities knowing that we would add on to the system as we developed it.
- Students – Ability to take coursework, and when an assessment is passed earn an achievement
- Instructional Staff – Review their learners’ progress, and interact with learners to assist in course
- Assessment Staff – Review assessments, reject or approve them, communicate with staff
- Academic Advisor Staff – Review learners’ pathway progress, and interact with learners to assist in academic progress
- Learning Experience Engineers – Build courses for eco-system, associate metadata with courses and assessments
- Systems Administrators – Manage users, and their access to the system, assist users with access issues
Solution
Declining Enrollment / Value
Every learner is assigned a learning pathway. Each pathway has associated goals, as well as assessments that evaluate the competency of learners so that they can earn their achievements. This is very much like the traditional education programs. The key to increasing enrollment is increasing the ROI to the learners. Here are the key differences in our system:
Credit for Prior Learning (CPL)
A system built on machine learning that can ingest transcripts, assessment results, resumes, and certificates. These inputs are evaluated and associated with recognized skills, competencies, degrees, and certificates. Because a machine is chewing through all this data, people are freed up to supervise the system and apply their skills towards verifying the source of the documents and following up on anything that might need further scrutiny.
- Give learners credit for academic experience, as well as job, and life experience
- Use machine learning algorithms to evaluate prior learning, reducing the completely manual process to verification
- Apply CPL to the pathway
- Reduce time to goal, and costs for learners
- CPL can happen anytime, not just at enrollment
Goals vs. Degrees
The system was also designed around a paradigm shift – move beyond degrees and give learners skills they need specifically to accomplish their career and life goals. Want more money in your current job? Maybe you just need a certificate or boot camp. Maybe a different career path is only a few courses away.
- Pathways adjust as learners accomplish goals shortening the time to goal
- Cost to goal is also evaluated and presented to users
Retention
In addition to higher ROI, and streamlined pathways, the traditional term-based system was being reevaluated. If learners were given choices of when they took courses and the flexibility to come and go they are less likely to drop out. The system tracks time-on-task so learners’ progress is still calculated.
Course / Program Development
Course creation was a complex and time-consuming process. Most universities hobble together multiple systems into a Frankenstein’s monster. These systems are brittle, slow to use, and nearly impossible to adapt to specific needs. We needed a better course system and one that could build courses in a way that we could reuse the content more.
- Build courses in reusable modules
- Associate all modules and assessments with meta-data
- Associate courses and assessments with pathways
- Tag key concepts, materials, and references so they can be updated independently
- Use AI to produce alternative forms of courses – Audio, video, and localized versions
- Use meta-data tags to switch specific examples within courses to repurpose the content for different disciplines
More details about this sub-project are in the authoring platform project.
The Results
Phases
We planned the release of this system in phases to allow for testing and iteration:
- Level Up Labs – A pilot program to test the efficacy of the ecosystem as an educational solution and a software system
- Vision 2025 – Roll out of programs and augmenting of the system to scale to the needs of the university
Each of these phases had multiple releases planned: POC, Alpha, Beta, and General Availability. We were able to release the POC, the Alpha, and were in the middle of the beta production when our team was laid off.
These diagrams show the complete ecosystem in each of the planned phases. There are other projects that dive deeper into each specific persona experience in my portfolio.
Success Metrics
Our goal was to get real students on the system in the beta release so that we could test the efficacy of the system. We needed to test two key metrics: the end-to-end functionality of the system, and the 1C-1C principle underlying the new course model.
1C-1C
One Competency – One Credit is based on Competency-Based Credit (CBC), a competency-based program that operates differently than a traditional college/university degree program. Instead of paying per credit hour for a fixed number of classes, you pay for a fixed amount of time and can take as many credits as you can within that time frame. While there are universities that are based on a CBC system, SNHU wanted to pair a competency equivalency of one credit. This would require each competency to equate to the equivalent hours, which translates to credits.
Another aspect we were working on was the breakdown of courses being a cluster of 3 credits. Traditionally learners must complete the whole course in order to get any credit for completion. With a model of ~3 competencies to a course, we could subdivide it into 1C-1C, allowing learners to gain credits in smaller chunks, and opening up opportunities for small credentials.
Underlying System
In addition to the business model, we needed to test all the moving parts of the system and conduct user testing to validate our results. We were unable to complete this before the department was closed.
Patent
I was one of the main contributors to the SNHU patent application for this project. Along with Micahel Moretti, our technical Product Manager, and Lisa Hodge, our UX Writer. You can read about our patent on “Technologies and services to deliver customized and responsive learning pathways and related systems and methods”.
Reflections
In light of SNHU closing down large portions of their business, we were unable to complete this project. The irony we all felt was that this project was the key to their future success as a business. We believe that the writing is on the wall for the higher education system, and the university that cracks this problem will pave the way for the industry. I was truly invested in the success of this project and was looking forward to proving its effectiveness and revolutionizing higher education for generations to come.