The Office of Online Education works with faculty, program heads, and subject matter experts to develop online and hybrid courses and offer resources that empower faculty success in teaching. Each team within the unit is vital in the development of effective online courses, and keeping everyone on the same page is an important but difficult task. With many moving parts, there was a great need for a tracking system that could document the diverse work happening within the unit.
After exploring a number of options, Online Education worked with the Digital Strategy and Transformation (DST) team to implement Salesforce as the system to serve all the needs. Salesforce offers a customer tracking system for campus relations and the Agile Accelerator application for project management. The Agile Accelerator allows for detailed tracking and reporting of projects, while also offering an intuitive interface where users can customize their work with Kanban boards, lists, and dashboards.
Goals
In the search for a robust project tracking platform and the eventual adoption of the Salesforce Agile Accelerator, the Online Education team aimed to achieve the following:
- Track all work done in the unit
- Track all customer/client relationships
- Provide a tool for the accountability for all team members
- Collect and provide accurate data for all work
- Gather the number of hours spent on projects
- Create records of all communications related to a project
- Calculate the cost of projects and programs in Online Education
- Manage the workflow of projects
Considerations for Selecting a Platform
Unit Responsibilities
The unit works on a diverse range of projects including:
- Online course development
- Special projects
- Recharge projects
- By request projects
- Campus relations
- Incoming cases for assistance
Unit Structure
The Office of Online Education is composed of three teams that work collaboratively on online course development. Each team is responsible for distinct parts of the process.
- Embedded Instructional Technologists begin the process of course development by working with the subject matter experts on preparatory materials. This is the pre-development phase.
- Instructional Designers (IDs) work with the subject matter experts to build the course.
- Media team members bring the course to life with video, graphics, interactives, and any other needed media materials.
Previous Challenges
Online Education struggled for many years to determine the cost to build an online course. Without a mechanism to assign a dollar figure, it was difficult to prepare, compare, and track costs across projects. In 2021, the unit took two important steps towards establishing upfront course build costs
- The unit established simple calculations based on the salaries of team members. For example, the average of all the instructional designers’ salaries became the cost per hour for ID work.
- The unit created a spreadsheet to track the number of hours each team member contributed to a course build. Hours could be broken down by role (ID, art, video, etc.).
These process improvements helped set the stage for initial conversations in late 2021 to determine if the Salesforce Agile Accelerator could meet the needs of the unit. As planning progressed, two areas were identified as targets for implementation of the platform: the intake process and the broader project management process.
Implementation
Online Education implemented the Agile Accelerator in November 2021.The process to adopt the project management platform was methodical and incremental, with the key to success being the unit’s continuous training and agile pivots to meet needs.
The DST team assisted Online Education with customizing the Agile Accelerator application to best fit their needs, including making all information about a project accessible on a single page. Since the launch, Online Education has continued to make process improvements in the following areas:
- Budget: Each course is assigned a budget to ensure the scope of work does not grow.
- Course cost: Agile Accelerator tabulates all the work done on a course to create a final course cost.
- Levels of project complexity: No two courses are the same, so the five levels of complexity (Simple, Standard, Complex, Extreme, STEM) have been established to help balance workloads for each team member.
- Dashboards: All team members can monitor their workload by viewing the dashboard.
- Reports: Data can easily be collected in reports to assist with decision making.
- Team roles: Roles are linked to the budget and course cost. There is an hourly rate for each role.
- Email extension: The Salesforce extension for Gmail allows team members to associate all communication with a project.
Outcomes
The transition to project tracking using the Agile Accelerator has been an incredible success for Online Education. With the increased functionality to collect and track project data over time, greater levels of information sharing and transparency have been achieved.
Online Education now has solid, accurate data about the unit’s work which can be used to make real-time, data-informed decisions. Newly accessible data includes, but is not limited to:
- Cost to develop a course
- Team hours to develop a course
- Individual contributions to projects (for personal or professional development)
- Scale of Online Education’s involvement in the development of programs across campus
The Agile Accelerator has also transformed the way the unit interacts with its customers, offering real-time information about projects to campus partners via partner dashboards. Data is also easily shared within the team and with campus leadership.