For years, Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) has offered online courses on a number of management topics such as Finance, Financial Accounting, Quantitative Methods, Spreadsheet Modeling, etc, for sale to academic customers. This eProduct line has been very successful and has been deployed to thousands of users annually, both for educational institutions (many of whom use the courses for program prematriculation gating or benchmarking) and for individual managers who can purchase the courses via the Harvard Business Review website. The platform on which the courses were hosted was a proprietary application built by the Harvard Business School (HBS) Educational Technology Group, since many of the courses were offered both to HBS students and to academic customers via HBP. After years of successful delivery, a decision was made to phase out this original platform and consider adopting a more robust and modern delivery platform. This blog provides an overview of the considerations and ultimate design and development plan for this new platform.
The Challenge
The original application was called the HBS Tutorial Platform and consisted of three parts: a Flash-based student-facing interface; an instructor's interface containing reporting features for course tracking and exam performance; and an authoring environment. At the time it was built, this custom platform allowed HBS to create a unique feature set not found in early learning management systems. But after years of use the Tutorial Platform faced some familiar ‘aging technology’ issues: a waning feature set, outdated code, a heavy use of Adobe Flash, a limited and complicated authoring environment, and diminishing institutional knowledge for maintenance and enhancements. The decision was made to retire the platform and replace it, potentially with different solutions for HBS students vs. external HBP customers.
Screenshot of student-facing course interface
The Design
To understand the requirements for Harvard Business Publishing, it’s best to first understand how we deliver PDF and eLearning products now to our customers. Our Harvard Business for Educators website allows faculty customers to search, aggregate, and deliver materials to students. Faculty first search for materials and then aggregate those materials into folders. These folders can be ‘activated’ as coursepacks for students – collections of materials that are accessed by a single URL (for more on how our coursepack utility works, see our website help page). The coursepacks are designed to then seamlessly deliver PDFs for download but also to seamless launch hosted eLearning products such as courses and simulations. We developed single sign-on application programming interfaces (APIs) between our website and these platforms, so that user registration information from our website is passed along to the third party sites. In this manner the students only have to register/login on our website but the online courses and simulations still receive the user information necessary to provide them unique access and navigation/performance tracking.
Screenshot of coursepack that links to the new eProduct Platform (faculty view)
So it is within that context that Harvard Business Publishing set out to determine requirements for replacing the Tutorial Platform. The website functionality would remain in place, but the ultimate platform that hosted the courses would be replaced. The architectural design and ultimate project management for this initiative was handled by John Gayle, our Learning Solutions Architect for the HBP Higher Education unit. John developed specific requirements to guide the project: the existing course experience had to be maintained so as not to disrupt repeat customers or change the fundamental pedagogical value of the courses, but also needed to enhance administrator functionality to accommodate a list of desired features that had amassed as the Tutorial Platform aged. And the platform should have added value by being able to host any web-based HBP product such as online multimedia business cases, web-based business calculators and tools, etc (and hence was dubbed the ‘eProduct Platform’). So the new eProduct Platform would need to meet and exceed the features and functionality of the original Tutorial Platform with regard to online courses but would also have the capacity to serve up additional online product types.
Additionally, our HBP Higher Education Learning Services group had begun offering enterprise academic customers the option of locally-hosting the online courses on their own learning management systems (LMS). This allowed customers to avoid having students log onto the HBP hosted version of the courses (since a local asset on the LMS required no authentication), and also allowed for greater integration of exam performance results into the customers’ LMS gradebooks, etc. Early work in this area was cumbersome since significant work was needed to create the “local-host” versions of the courses. This was partly due to the legacy architecture of the Tutorial Platform – the display template and platform were integrated in ways that required a database in order to display XML-based content and also required server-side scripting for certain features and actions.
Since then there has been significant advances in standardizing how learning management systems can import ‘cartridges’ of content for local-hosting. The most promising work has been created by the IMS Global non-profit consortium. IMS maintains a number of education-related technology standards including their “Common Cartridge” format. Most modern LMS platforms are now Common Cartridge-compliant, meaning that content providers such as Harvard Business Publishing can create a single Common Cartridge of any given product and should not have to alter it at all, or at least significantly, in order for it to be imported and usable by a customer’s LMS. (For more on IMS standards, see earlier blog post) So John architected the new eProduct Platform so that our hosted version actually serves up the same Common Cartridge version of the online courses as we would provide to customers who want to local-host on their LMS. This allows us to maintain a single code version for both hosted and local customers.
Development
The project was divided into three major components: the platform, development of a new template architecture for the courses themselves, and then converting our existing catalog of courses to the new template.
An RFP was put out for the platform development and we selected San Francisco-based Forio Business Simulations, the same vendor our Product team partners with to develop our line of business simulation games. Forio came out ahead for a few reasons. First,they have a great platform (Simulate) that we knew we could leverage for basic functionality and user management. Second, we know their technology prowess and have always been impressed with their ability to develop standards-based custom solutions. Third, they already had worked with us on the API between our site and their platforms, so the integration work was a known quantity. Finally, the Common Cartridge design meant that some of the ‘usual suspects’ for online course delivery had no advantage since not many folks have yet developed online course delivery systems based on Common Cartridge (although the list is growing, including our friends at Epigeum). The new platform will replicate the exam functionality, basic course hosting, and administrative performance and navigation tracking from the legacy platform. But we’ll also gain long-sought features such as the ability for faculty and academic program customers to configure their own pass/fail thresholds on exams.
Screenshot of instructor interface (Class Summary view)
Screenshot of instructor interface (Class Detail view)
An RFP was also put out for the template (or “course viewer”) work. John wanted the new template to consist of HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and Javascript (but no Flash) to enable the platform to be iPad-compatible in the future. Although Flash assets within the courses themselves (animations, graphics, videos) will ultimately also have to be replaced, something our Product group is working on now. Boston-based Radiant Llama was selected to design the template. John and Radiant Llama came up with a multi-faceted approach to the design of the template. This was challenging since the original Tutorial Platform evolved over many years and hence the courses developed on that platform utilized a number of variant configurations over time. A Javascript course viewer would then be developed that renders content appropriately. But since the legacy framework so heavily relied on Flash even for positioning assets on the screen as well as for integrating assets with animation/video player controls on the template itself, extracting ourselves from Flash for the viewer wouldn’t be possible until the aforementioned Flash asset conversions were complete for each course. In other words, if we wanted to roll out the first version of courses on the new platform and do so without yet converting every Flash asset to HTML – a delivery timeframe requirement given the deadline for phasing out of the new platform – we would have to temporarily accommodate aspects of the original Flash template architecture. Radiant Llama addressed this by including a ‘Flash adaptor’ as part of their ‘command transmission’ architecture – basically, they would architect the template to utilize a special adaptor that allowed us to maintain the original Flash asset controls as long as they were present in the courses themselves, but then allow for the Flash adaptor to be abandoned once we completed the asset conversion work and hence no longer needed the legacy Flash controls.
We originally anticipated putting out a third RFP for converting courses themselves to the new template. But it soon became evident that given the need for quality assurance testing of various segments of the courses as part of the template development, it made the most sense to allow Radiant Llama to tackle the full course conversions as well. We also were able to tackle some ‘nice-to-have’ tasks earlier than expected, such as augmenting our Mathematics for Managers course by replacing image-based formulas with MathML.
Rollout
The project is going smoothly and we don’t anticipate any issues with rolling this out officially in January, 2012. Existing customers will sunset their use on the legacy platform through 2012, but all new course instances starting in January will be deployed on the new platform. We’ll then quickly work to enable our Product team to leverage the promise of the new platform by adding additional product types such as online multimedia case studies, etc.
A special thanks to John and our partners at Forio and Radiant Llama for the great work.
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