Solution
Instructure introduced the University of Memphis to K16 Solutions, which proved to be the only vendor capable of handling such a speedy migration.
“K16 Solutions did a phenomenal job,” says Dr. Scott W. Vann, Director of Academic Learning Support at the University of Memphis. Even with the rigid time frame, the team was still able to benefit from three pilot phases before beginning the actual migration. “We provided them several dozen courses from each college,” he explains. This allowed faculty and instructional designers to log in and check each course and provide feedback to K16 Solutions. “Every once in a while, a header would be out of place, and they’d adjust the API on their end,” he said. After a few rounds of internal testing, K16 Solutions migrated the courses with ease.
Weekly check-in calls also helped, as did a thorough scope of work and a realistic timeline. On the regular calls, which included several members of the K16 Solutions team, the University of Memphis would report any issues and share how K16 Solutions could improve the process. “They consistently asked for feedback on how to make the Scaffold Archiving interface more user friendly,” Vann says. “Faculty wanted the ability to bulk download student data from an entire course, and they adjusted their system to provide that option,” he noted.
“Having such an openness and the efficiency with which our feedback was integrated was really impressive,” says Dr. Barrett Schwarz, Instructional Designer at the university. “Most issues we found were no longer issues after a couple of days.”
Vann and his team delivered weekly updates to the Provost’s office as well. “We were in constant communication with the faculty,” he says, noting that they provided dates for testing each round of courses. “Having faculty involved in the process and testing made it easier for us because they know the course content even better than we do.” Because of the thorough beta testing, Vann says he can only think of 12 courses out of 27,000 that faculty reported having issues with.