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From days to minutes: rebuilding mini course publishing

Replaced an error-prone, developer-dependent process for launching mini courses on Global PD Teams with an admin tool content editors run themselves, and redesigned the learner experience along the way.

The problem

Global PD Teams offers mini courses: short courses made up of videos, readings, and quizzes. Launching a new one touched almost every part of the system, needed a developer at several steps, and took days of back-and-forth. It was easy to get wrong.

Nobody asked me to change it. The first time I had to launch a mini course after taking over the platform, I looked at the process, decided I wasn't going to repeat it, and rebuilt it in about the time it was expected to take to publish a single course the old way. The next day, the content team published a new course they had been preparing.

The old process

  1. Content staff built a playlist on the site, logged in as one specific user account.
  2. The SKU, name, and hours of content were inserted into the database by hand.
  3. Cover images were committed to source control, and the code was updated with the new playlist's ID.
  4. After a deploy, more database inserts gave every subscriber access to the new course.

What I did

  1. Built an admin page to see every mini course at a glance and create new ones, with all of a course’s details in one place instead of spread across the database, the codebase, and a special user account.
  2. Let admins pick materials straight from the content library and put them in order, removing playlists from the process entirely.
  3. Added a draft mode, so editors can make changes and preview a course exactly as learners will see it before it goes live.
  4. Alongside the backend work, redesigned the learner-facing mini course experience: a modern UI that puts our authors and content front and center, with clearly defined sections and visible progress through each course.

The result

  • Launching a mini course went from days of back-and-forth to minutes, with no developer and no deploy.
  • Content editors own the whole process, including previewing before launch.
  • Learners get a clearer, more modern course experience.
  • The team was thrilled, and we’re now building on it to offer more LMS-style content and replace a third-party platform used for virtual events.

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