Continuing Education Provider Saves Time & Money Ditching Fragmented Software Network

Comprehensive Continuing Education via Instructor-Led Webinars

From its inception, ABAC has served a diverse population of professionals with educational instructor-led webinars. Without an LMS, the webinar content itself was engaging, but the experience of signing up for it, accessing the live content, and downloading the certificate of completion afterwards was more complicated than necessary. On top of that, the lack of automations forced the team to manually perform many necessary processes, consuming valuable time and adding to the overall workload.

While the work ABAC does is extremely valuable, their team was struggling to keep up behind the scenes. Adrienne knew she needed to find a way to move from mostly manual processes to something more scalable and automated, with a better user experience for learners (and instructors!). Her search for an LMS that could do it all led her to us.

“The team of people from Academy of Mine working behind the scenes and with me directly are responsive, knowledgeable, and easy to work with.” – Adrienne F.

Siloed Software Led to Extra Work

Prior to early 2019, ABAC did not use a true learning management system, instead relying on a fragmented network of tools and apps. This contributed to several issues:

Purchasing a course didn't automatically give students access to it. Instead, after purchasing webinar(s), users had to locate their emailed receipt and then find the downloadable PDF attached to it. That PDF, in turn, had instructions on how to embed their access link in a third-party webinar platform in order to access their course (and reminded them to save their link somewhere for later use, or else risk losing access).

The webinars were conducted via Webex, separately from ABAC’s company website and without any custom branding. To attend a webinar, students had to leave ABAC’s website. From visiting multiple websites to maintaining multiple login accounts, this process was a complicated and often confusing user experience, especially for first-time users. And of course, if students wanted to reference course materials while watching the webinar, they had to toggle back and forth between different tabs or windows.

Another major drawback was that Webex’s webinar solution didn't have a way for ABAC to include their branding in the application’s interface during webinars. Given that the majority of time students spend interacting with ABAC is during webinars, this was a lost opportunity to build company branding while reinforcing the value of ABAC.

Webex regularly took 48+ hours to deliver ABAC's webinar recordings, delaying student access. While they focus on live, instructor-led webinars, ABAC also does their best to provide flexibility for students unable to attend the live webinar by giving them the option to watch the recorded webinar on the ABAC website. However, user access to webinars was often held up by Webex's slow turnaround time, and when the recordings did arrive, the quality was sometimes questionable, leaving the ABAC team to fix them. When this happened, students were left waiting for up to a week before they received the corrected webinar recordings, and those recordings still sometimes had irreparable quality issues. In addition to being frustrating for students, the whole process was often stressful for the staff as well, who were working behind the scenes to get recordings edited and uploaded ASAP.

Course evaluation feedback from students was manually collected. Any good educator knows that collecting and reviewing feedback is critical to improving their courses. In ABAC's case, they were collecting feedback from surveys that were provided at the end of a webinar and/or in the resources section of the site where ABAC posted webinar recordings. This often led to students missing the link or not submitting feedback without multiple reminders, which meant ABAC was losing out on valuable feedback.

Webinar course certificates had to be manually created and individually emailed to students. After a course was complete, the ABAC team had to manually create course certificates for every student in the course, while students had to wait for their certificates to be emailed to them. This created additional backend work and put students in an awkward position, as they needed proof of completing continuing education courses to show accreditation bodies.

Suffice it to say that while ABAC made the best of the resources available at its disposal, company capabilities were still limited by the functionality of the tools on hand. In turn, this directly impacted the quality of educational experience provided to students.

The Solution

In hopes of learning more about the organization and their existing solutions, Academy of Mine reached out to ABAC in February 2019. Academy of Mine’s product managers and developers had several in-depth conversations with Adrienne to review ABAC’s business processes and document the essential functions an LMS would need to replace the current setup. After analyzing their business requirements, our team was able to map them against the existing functionality of Academy of Mine and create a plan for custom-developing other features to meet ABAC's exact needs.

To stay ahead of the curve, discussions also included questions about any additional media formats and emerging technologies that ABAC might need to use in the long term.

“I have been looking for an LMS solution for quite some time. Academy of Mine had most features I needed, but not all...but as we grow, they are willing to grow with us. We are working on customizations that meet our needs now and in the future and I am thrilled.” – Adrienne F.

It was clear that ABAC would require specific functionalities in their new learning management system to fulfill their key business requirements, including:

• A robust webinar solution that would be native to their new LMS, integrate seamlessly with the ABAC site, and — most importantly — be easy for students to use and access.
• The ability to record webinars and have the recordings available to ABAC with a much shorter turnaround time of a few hours.
• A built-in course evaluation feature that prompts students to send feedback within the platform itself, with the prompts sent immediately after a webinar, while students are still actively engaged with their course.
• Automatic access to courses after a purchase is completed, as well as the ability to view their purchase history with ABAC, prior courses, and course materials.
• The ability to connect the platform with additional external solutions, allowing for features and functionalities to be supplemented via integrations with the LMS. This allows the platform’s core functionalities to expand in response to ABAC’s changing needs.

With the scope of ABAC’s platform requirements determined and the details nailed down, Adrienne was confident in the ability of Academy of Mine to deliver and decided to move forward with the investment of a new learning management system.

A Custom-Tailored Solution

After all the details were finalized in April 2019, our developers got to work on customizing ABAC’s learning management system. Based on the importance of adaptability over time, their LMS was built out with the functionality of being able to add new customizations and system updates in response to ABAC’s changing needs.

“My experience up until this point has been with larger companies with terrible communication, disregard for the small business, and no regard for how their product directly impacts my revenue. Academy of Mine is completely different.” – Adrienne F.

See below for a more detailed look at the custom features and functionalities we built into ABAC’s LMS.

Fully integrated eCommerce functionality & instant course access

Instead of waiting for access to be granted after purchase and then logging into their webinar on an entirely different website, students are now able to easily pay for and conveniently access their webinar courses on one website that seamlessly integrates with the ABAC platform.

Comprehensive student dashboard

Students benefit from a more efficient user experience by accessing their webinar series and course materials in one cohesive platform. Via their student dashboard, they are able to access prior webinars, course grades, certificates, and order history, while remaining in contact with webinar instructors and ABAC staff.

Convenient & dynamic certificate generation

Automatic course certificate generation is perhaps one of the most useful features available in a platform. As referenced above, ABAC's courses are often taken by students across a variety of professions. Each of those students requires a certificate of completion to meet their occupation's specific continuing education requirements, and the exact specs for those certificate can vary from profession to profession. Because of this, we built a feature that allows students' professions to be mapped against different certificate templates, automatically generating the correct certificates for students in different professions taking the same course.

This feature has multiple benefits: it saves course instructors time, gives students instant access to certificates of completion for continuing education credit, and lets students download the certificates later at their own convenience.

Native webinar solution

The cornerstone of ABAC’s business is their live instructor-led lecture series, so their new webinar solution was a high priority. It needed to be technically reliable and easily accessible for students, while also fulfilling all of ABAC’s business requirements.

Their custom webinar solution was built on the framework of BigBlueButton, with a few changes to fit their specific needs. The finished webinar solution is easily launched by students through a link embedded in their course materials, and the webinar itself takes place within ABAC's platform.

Once the webinar is over, the recording is then generated, automatically loaded into the course, and made available to students in only a handful of hours (as opposed to the 2+ days it sometimes took with Webex). This makes it significantly easier for the ABAC team to share recorded webinars with students who were unable to attend the live instructor-led sessions.

Built-in student course evaluation feature

In a feature we built specifically for ABAC, their students now see a course evaluation once they click “Submit Course” after completing a course. Designed to capitalize on a student’s active engagement while they're still within a course, this requires the student to complete the evaluation questionnaire and provide ABAC with valuable student feedback before they can submit their course as finished and receive their certificate of course completion.

Boosted Productivity and Better User Experience

Following the implementation of their new learning management system, ABAC very quickly saw benefits impacting multiple levels of the company:

• Students benefit from an all-around improved user experience. From easier access to webinars to being able to access all certificates and course materials in one convenient dashboard, the new LMS streamlined students' educational experience and enabled them to get more out of their ABAC webinar series.
• The new LMS has saved ABAC substantial amounts of time and money. From processing recorded webinars to creating students’ course certificates, the automated processes built into their learning management system has changed the entire team's workflow for the better.
• ABAC’s dedicated custom webinar solution has improved the company’s branding, as well as its industry reputation. Their webinar solution is at the heart of students’ interaction with ABAC's staff, instructors, and course content. After implementing their new and fully integrated webinar platform, ABAC has received positive feedback from students and staff, commenting on its ease of use and improved capabilities. The improved webinar solution has been a huge win for ABAC on both operational and instructional levels.

“The time you put in to solve the last piece of the puzzle to make the ABAC Academy of Mine LMS fully functional was immediately life changing for me.” – Adrienne F.

We're thrilled with the improvements ABAC has seen in both its students' user experience and its business processes after implementing their customized LMS. We look forward to working with them and continuing to update their platform as the company’s needs change over time.

Want to see what kind a customized LMS could do for your business? Sign up for a demo or send us a message today.