Three-Headed Project
Background
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, many organizations faced the challenge of quickly pivoting to fully-remote for all aspects of business. For many, this resulted in employees transitioning to WFH and modifying processes to accommodate this new work environment. For Extension and International Programs (EIP) at CSUF, this meant a complete reimaging of core products that were designed to be delivered in-person.
Professional Development programs are a key, high-revenue piece of EIP’s portfolio, representing over 25 programs and 100 individual full-length courses. Examples include Digital Marketing, Business Analysis, and Lean Six Sigma certificate programs. Of these, 12 programs were delivered in a face-to-face or hybrid modality. Temporarily sunsetting these programs would mean a substantial hit to EIP’s revenue, so a priority was set to identify if and how we could pivot and continue offering these programs.
Strategy
This project alone by itself was daunting – reimaging F2F courses in a virtual modality while maintaining an effective and sound learning experience, all with little to no time. In addition to this, I was in the middle of two other large and seemingly unrelated projects – transitioning all online e-learning content from Flash to HTML5, and beginning to map out our department’s LMS transition from Moodle to Canvas.
All projects were considered high priority and critical to ongoing operations, so project prioritization was key. I began by identifying the general rollout timelines:
Transition to F2F Virtual | Immediately (!)
Flash to HTML5 | Adobe Flash unsupported by modern browsers starting December 31st, 2020
LMS Migration | Soft rollout of Canvas early January 2020. Moodle supported until end of year, Canvas only beginning January 2021
Each of these projects demanded their own page and are separated for readability. Continue below you'll find how I tackled these problems one after the other.