Scaling 1,400 Course Launches Without Breaking the Experience

Context

At a large university, the sudden shift online meant an enormous volume of courses had to move into Canvas quickly — in partnership with faculty who had very different levels of comfort with digital teaching.

Problem

One-at-a-time, artisanal course building could not scale to the volume or the timeline, and inconsistency hurt the student experience. The real problem was systemic: how do you launch at volume while keeping usability, consistency, and quality from degrading?

Constraints

• Extreme volume and a compressed timeline.
• Highly variable faculty readiness and content quality.
• A shared platform (Canvas) with fixed capabilities to design within.
• Operational issues surfacing continuously and needing triage.

Approach

• Shifted from bespoke builds to reusable structures — consistent course scaffolds and navigation patterns faculty could adopt quickly.
• Designed the faculty-facing process as its own experience: clear steps, sensible defaults, and just-enough guidance to reduce friction.
• Used structured review to catch usability and accessibility issues before students hit them.
• Tracked recurring environment issues and fed them into operational problem-solving (supported via Salesforce).

Key decisions

• Treated consistency as a feature: predictable structure across courses lowered student cognitive load more than any single course’s polish.
• Optimized the builder (faculty) experience, not just the end (student) experience — the bottleneck was upstream.
• Prioritized "good and shipped, consistently" over "perfect and late" given the timeline, without dropping the accessibility floor.

Accessibility & ethics

Baked accessibility into the shared scaffolds and the review step (structure, navigability, readable content) so that accessibility scaled with the template instead of depending on each individual builder remembering it.

Outcome

• Contributed to launching 1,400+ online courses during the pandemic response.
• A repeatable structure and review approach that kept the student experience consistent at scale.
• Faster, lower-friction course setup for faculty of varying technical comfort. [add metric: e.g., setup-time reduction if known]

Reflection

Scale is a design problem, not just an ops problem. The leverage was in the reusable system and the builder experience — design the template and the process, and quality scales with them.