Client Overview
A professional school within the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the school employed more than 1,200 full-time faculty and roughly 2,750 professional non-faculty and staff employees
Business Challenges
The client was using multiple technologies and tools to create and manage web based curriculum and content that was resulting in the following issues
- Inefficient content management with high maintenance costs
- Multiple tools to create curriculum content often led to broken links & overheads
- The school was incurring high costs on account of maintenance of static systems running on proprietary and monolithic servers
- Inadequate infrastructure
- Managing an ever growing number of digital learning resources had become very difficult due to inefficiencies in the content publishing process. Delivery of digital learning resources (i.e. CD / DVD or flash media) took anywhere from a few hours to a day, and the resources had to be physically transported (to the managing staff) because of large file size e-mail attachment restrictions
- Dissatisfied user base
- The school was witnessing an increasing push from students and faculty to offer on-demand publishing system that would accelerate the content delivery process
Solution
- Curriculum management system
- The solution empowered subject matter experts to easily manage the lifecycle of course content, from planning to creation to delivery
- Role-based security framework
- A membership system, integrated with the school's existing central LDAP repository that enabled the assignment of roles and responsibilities to different departments / individuals for various sections of the website through Single Sign On (SSO)
- Work flow and process management
- Role based permissions and work flows were incorporated to facilitate content creation and publishing based on policies and best practices. This ensured that the content being created and delivered was interrelated, leading to improved course quality
- Extendable framework
- Plone framework helped the university add new content types to manage the delegated management of digital learning material. The solution provided an integrated calendar add-in that supported posting of upcoming courses, and facilitated easy viewing of courses and topics by enrolling students
Benefits
- Improved the quality of online course content
- Intuitive and user-friendly content management drafting and publishing process (formatting of content, inserting of images, etc.) made distributed authoring very efficient
- Speedy updates and modifications were being done without any errors
- Streamlined the content development process
- Saving of 2 to 4 hours / day through streamlined content development process
- Facilitated tracking notification of curricular changes
- Enables a low-cost, easy to maintain school-wide curriculum management system
Testimonial
"No major changes had been made to how we present curriculum materials to students in the past 5 years. New demands and new technological capabilities required we find a new method to deliver content. Zope/Plone offered the flexibility we needed at a low cost. CIGNEX provided the expertise to put our ideas into action.” Eve Juliano - Director of Educational Technology Group
