Apollo Group Learning Platform
The Apollo group set out on a large task to increase market share and create a new revenue stream by creating a learning platform for smaller schools to give them the ability of delivering online education.
This platform was an all-inclusive “classroom in a box” that provided a turnkey solution for institutions wishing to provide classes online. It had modules that could be delivered standalone or as a package. This package started from the marketing site and completed with sophisticated and proprietary lead scoring, tracking a participant through first touch point all the way through the product life cycle to graduation.
As Product Manager, I was responsible for the initial vision and design of the entire administrative area of the platform. I worked with Dev Ops, Engineers, IT Administrators and developers to gather requirements and use cases from all of the areas of the business, including but not limited to: the classroom, tenant client configuration and integration, educational material, content generation and user permissions.
This case study is complimentary to my work on the profile located here
We mapped out pain points and user stories, and developed and created use cases where we mapped out the complexities of what we had learned from our broad analysis. I then translated those requirements into agile scrum user stories with wireframes/prototypes and other visual artifacts to communicate my vision to the rest of the organization.
This platform control had to be accessed by administrators to control dozens of tenant schools that the Apollo group provided to, as well as cater to the unique needs of the primary existing schools.
A large effort was needed to provide an administrative interface in which IT staff could set up, configure and customize the users, programs, and classrooms of each tenant school. The solution had to be scalable as demand increased and easy enough to configure advanced permissions and configurations by semi-technical admins.
The Admin Console had to serve as the nerve center and control for: the enrollment machine and user creation, assessment, placement and enrollment, and classroom and materials creation. It needed to administer all the functions of the platform in a central location with a common set of interaction patterns and frameworks to replace manual/hacked processes and controls that had been cobbled together over the years.
The university was standing behind its reputation as a leader and worked over the years to productize its ecosystem that plugged into dozens of third-party apps to form a cohesive platform product offering.
This centralized control had to also provide insight into things, like analytics on a micro and macro scale and usage patterns to be fed into predictive models with complex data visualization provided by third party tools.
Add on top of all that integration into existing legacy tenant information systems and content management applications, and you begin to get a sense of some of the complexities of this admin tool.
Research
Starting by competitive analysis we first looked at the question build vs. buy. A lot of vendor analysis and feature comparison went into the decision to build. Along with that I also did huge amount of persona building and contextual inquiry on the user who would be operating within this environment.
Sitting with the actual users was a key factor making the decision on whether to try and shoehorn an existing product into the mold we needed or build out a minimal viable product custom tailored to our specifications. In the end we decided on the latter, and iteratively added on features as we onboarded more and more clients.
By working with architects, business stakeholders, educators and a lot more, I gathered all the use cases that had to be considered for all the areas of the ecosystem. Contextual analysis brought me into the control centers of IT infrastructure and gave me a hands-on lesson in platform control.
I had to define the “what” before anything, and trying to do that across all departments was monumental.
From handling things like deploying entire school classrooms, create users, and managing permissions in the classroom to how to update a banner on the login page, this platform control had to include everything that was done manually, and usually took teams of developers and business analysts.
Design
Curriculum Design
One of the key components that was built from scratch was the curriculum design that was accessed by the faculty to create the materials for each of the courses. We worked with faculty and teachers alongside curriculum designers to map out their process of creating a course and the assignments, and create a system built for them by them.
Edit Course Offering
The ability to look at specific users in any institution was a common pain point. The curriculum went into courses that were one level below programs, and a master admin would be able to see all users in all schools within a course. Ultimately, most admins would only see per school, but this view is a SUPER admin that could easily traverse through all the universities.
Add Edit Roles
A large amount of my time was spent figuring out how to give control of administrative tasks like the creation and assignment of users and roles outside of the normal student enrollment. Complex permission and roles were a pain point as we attempted to adapt our educational platform control model to other schools and systems.
Several of our clients did not have a central student information system, so we had to provide basic platform controls to administrators to perform their duties, sometimes overriding other permissions in legacy systems we had no control or access to.
Classroom Assignment / User Control
Once the users had been created and assigned a role, we needed the ability to place that student or instructor in the correct program and class. This typically was handled programmatically but one of the pain points we were also solving is mismatching, and errors associated with mapping user from one system to another.
One of our key features was the ability to control the institution’s current systems outside of our platform as the institution gradually adopted more and more of the platform. The need for administrative control through a UI was an attractive offering to most of our clients.
Result
The Admin Console gave the ability to control the new classrooms and content authoring and syndication, but also control the core features around creation of new schools, programs, courses and users within them.
It reduced the amount of manual processes and crazy scripts that the administrators had relied on for years. It was an attractive offering to allow non-technical staff to perform common tasks that were needed daily. The platform went on to power dozens of tenant schools across the world and is still used in some of Apollo’s small schools.