Introduction
National University, a veteran-founded nonprofit, has been dedicated to meeting the needs of nontraditional, working and military students by providing accessible and affordable higher education opportunities since 1971.
“A large percentage of our student population is online,” Shane Strup, senior director of learning design at National University shared. “We still offer face-to-face classes, mainly for military students and programs requiring lab interactions. However, the majority are online. Historically, our online students have been in their 30s to 50s, often married with children and working full-time. They juggle multiple roles, being parents, spouses, students and sometimes even coaches.”
The Challenge
“Recently, we’ve noticed a shift with younger students enrolling, especially post-COVID, as more high school graduates are familiar with and prefer online education. This trend is making our student population younger. But even with that change, our courses are designed to meet the needs of these busy professionals, providing flexibility and accessibility to help them balance their various commitments,” Strup said.
With a significant portion of its students studying online, the university has to ensure that courses are not only engaging but also accessible and compliant with modern standards.
Two years ago, National University partnered with D2L’s Learning Services team and began utilizing D2L’s Creator+ tool in Brightspace to achieve their goals. It’s safe to say they had a daunting task ahead: migrating and updating over 3,000 courses to meet modern standards of accessibility, mobile responsiveness and consistent design.
The university’s learning experience design team engaged D2L to augment their capacities to uplift courses and ensure the most up-to-date accessibility guidelines in order to help increase student engagement.
Jeff Salin, senior manager of learning experience at D2L, highlighted the scale of the engagement:
“We notice that as clients are moving into Brightspace, they’re sometimes coming with 10 years of outdated courses. Often, there are thousands of courses that need to be migrated over, and they’re not going to touch every single one of those. It would take years.”
“We ran audits where we looked at accessibility considerations and found cases where there would be images in course content, but they didn’t contain alt text, or there were videos that didn’t contain closed captioning. They also had content like PDFs and PowerPoints that weren’t compliant,” Salin explained.
Strup echoed the need to make content more accessible. “We knew there hadn’t been as big of a focus on accessibility as there should have been [at National University], and so that was one of the big things that we really wanted to work with D2L on.”
Jennifer Pontano is also a senior director of learning experience at National University. She and Strup oversee a team of about 50 people, including learning experience designers, creative services and quality assurance professionals. They recognized the need for external support to ensure their courses met the needs of their primarily online student population.
The National University team acknowledged the specific challenges that come with learning online. Strup noted that one of the primary challenges in an online course environment is keeping students engaged and motivated.
“With so many online options available, including those from brick-and-mortar schools, students often switch between institutions. Our focus is on making content both engaging and relevant to retain students and keep them excited about their courses at National University,” Strup said.
Pontano added that retention is key. “We constantly ask ourselves what makes students stay and matriculate, and conversely, what causes them to leave. Understanding these factors is crucial to ensuring that students continue their education and ultimately graduate.”
“At the end of the day, we want to make sure we’re meeting the needs of our students,” Pontano said.
Solution
To address these challenges, National University partnered with D2L’s Learning Services team, purchasing two dedicated engagements.
“The dedicated engagement offering provides all our Learning Services expertise in a multi-year engagement that allows us to act as an extension of a client’s team. We are essentially embedded with our customer, and can guide the course design process,” Salin said. “They also bought a bucket of hours for additional flexibility. Typically, clients will use those hours for multimedia development.”
What National University was really looking for from D2L was the expertise to help the university enhance its online courses while keeping with the most up-to-date accessibility guidelines.
Here are a few highlights from the project:
Custom HTML Templates and Creator+ Integration
“National University didn’t have an applied consistent HTML template for its organization,” Salin shared. “We said, ‘Let’s create course consistencies for your faculty members. Let’s add in some interactions.’ Some of that is Creator+; some of that is custom tools.
“We have a Socratic tool that allows you to input information in an assignment directly in an HTML page. So, it allows for things like journaling, video creation and gamification. What this is doing is using the HTML templates and Creator+ to create a more consistent, fully mobile, improved learning experience.”
Accessibility Audits and Remediation
As noted above, National University partnered with D2L to support added capacity to execute at scale.
“At D2L, we do this day in, day out, so we’re very efficient at it. We create automation tools and use AI to solve these problems. So, with National University, wherever we saw applicable support, we went in and helped,” Salin noted.
Pontano and Strup shared this sentiment, stating that while their internal team was capable, they appreciated the added capacity to handle the large-scale project. D2L’s expertise and resources were crucial in ensuring that the courses were accessible and user-friendly.
Badging and Micro-Credentialing Strategy
To add gamification and skills-based learning, D2L developed a badging and micro-credentialing strategy. This approach can help keep students engaged and motivated to complete their programs.
One example of this is in the university’s Spanish course. The team created a custom “interactive passport” element to display badges that students could collect throughout the course, encouraging participation and engagement.
These badges were tied to the completion of various activities, such as discussions, oral communication exercises, and quizzes. From a design standpoint, the passports were designed to visually match the overarching theme of “travelling abroad,” immersing learners in their virtual travel experience. By implementing badges consistently across modules, students can develop a familiarity with and expectation for earning their next badge.
Results
The collaboration between National University and D2L yielded impressive results. The university uplifted and enhanced nearly 200 courses, which can touch about 80% of their total student population. These courses included general education and introductory courses that most students would take at some point in their academic journey.
Key Achievements Include
- completing 170 high-touch uplifts, each requiring 50 to 100 hours of effort
- updating approximately 790 PDFs, 800 PowerPoint presentations, and 6,720 course content pages
- converting inaccessible presentations into accessible formats, such as transforming Storyline presentations into PowerPoint
- enhancing videos with closed captions and descriptive transcript
Collectively, these efforts significantly modernized and enriched the university’s online learning experience.
Speaking on the collaboration, Pontano said, “Essentially, we took the highest enrolled courses, and the Learning Services team helped us make sure they were as accessible and user-friendly as possible.”
In terms of process, Strup said that working with D2L allowed them to enhance existing courses and learn new approaches to course design and development.
“We’d turn over the courses to D2L and say, ‘This is already good, but we see opportunities where we can make it even better to enhance the student experience.’ From there, D2L’s learning and design teams would work with our faculty to improve it,” he explained.
The use of D2L’s Creator+ tool also proved beneficial. Pontano mentioned that they started adding Creator+ elements into their courses and were hopeful that these additions would improve the student experience.
Melissa Wells and Melany McNew are managers on the learning experience design teams at National University. Much of their work involves collaborating with learning experience designers, course authors and experts, and external staff from D2L. Both Wells and McNew praised Creator+ for its ease of use and the time it saved in course development.
“My team works on a lot of science courses, and we use Creator+,” Wells said. “It’s been a huge time-saver and has opened up more design possibilities for our courses because it’s so easy to use.”
McNew highlighted the convenience of Creator+: “If we’re talking about a real cut and dry example, [a course author] will give us a text narrative of what they want that week’s lesson to be, and then we look at it and go, wall of text, what can we do with this to make it a bit more engaging? That’s where the creativity in how we share that comes in. Instead of text, can we do a formative assessment with this in Creator+? Can we do a hotspot graphic? For the sake of simplicity, let’s take a simple quotation – can we highlight it in a way to break up the content for the student?”
Wells also appreciated the support from D2L: “What was fantastic is that D2L came in and did accessibility training for two of our learning exchanges. Having that connection and learning about information from different experts is so important.”
McNew added, “One of the key things that’s very helpful for us is that Creator+ lives within the LMS. So, if someone needs to tweak a question or a graphic that’s done in Creator+, they have the capability to do that. It eliminates a lot of steps.”
Looking to the Future
Now that National University’s specific engagement with D2L’s Learning Services team has ended, it’s fair to say that the partnership and the use of D2L’s Creator+ significantly improved the accessibility and engagement of their online courses. The collaboration addressed the university’s challenges and provided scalable solutions that benefited both the institution and its students.
By leveraging D2L’s expertise and resources, National University was able to create a more inclusive and engaging learning environment for its nontraditional, working and military student population.
As Wells shared, “The thing I love about National University is it’s always about the student. Any conversation or meeting we have; it always comes back to the student.”
Learn how partnering with D2L’s Learning Services team can enhance learning environments for your students.
All images are courtesy of National University and have been used with permission.
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