Fusion Productions - Integrating Meetings, Learning & Technology

Organization

The National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) serves its members and advances the field of research administration through professional development, the sharing of knowledge, and by fostering community. Everything NCURA does boils down to communication. Whether it is sponsoring workshops and national conferences, publishing micrographs, electronic newsletters and journals, or hosting listservs, there is a constant ebb and flow of information exchanged between NCURA and its members.

At the millennium, NCURA made a deep commitment to strengthen its responsiveness to its members by expanding and enhancing its virtual communities. Because education is a core focus of the association's community activity, developing new and varied sources for knowledge sharing is critical for providing continued member value.

Following its commitment to develop its virtual communities, NCURA ventured into the world of distance learning. In 1998, NCURA began offering learning events to its members via satellite link to various locations around the country and online sessions using a discussion board format with a moderator and featured speaker. Later the association added webinars to the mix. These offerings proved to be very popular with NCURA's members.

To continue its expansion into distance learning, NCURA decided to offer a self-paced online course with the faculty available by email. NCURA approached Fusion Productions of Webster, NY to develop a primer course on Federal Contracting. The first run of the course was released to students on a weekly basis, with two new lessons being made available each week.

NCURA wanted to have some of the functionality of a learning management system, such as the ability to track member course registration, and learning features such as interactive exercises, quizzes, final exams, and personalized certificate creation.  While Fusion offers LMS implementation and hosting services, NCURA could not justify the expense of investing in a full-featured LMS until it determined that there was a market for the courses. NCURA believed it was much more important to deliver outstanding learning for its members with a demonstrable ROI, than to invest most of its training and development budget on learning infrastructure.

Thus, Fusion was faced with these challenges:

• How to provide the basic functionality of a full-featured learning management system for an association that could not justify the expense?
• How to provide an attractive ROI to an association that needed to test the receptivity of its membership to a new technology and new form of learning?
• How to create a high-tech, high-touch learning experience?
• How to customize the learning event to take into account the association's branding and the desire to have interactive exercises, quizzes, final testing capability, system-generated certificate of completion, and monthly reporting documenting usage and test results?

Fusion offered to develop the course and create a Simple LMS application for NCURA.  The Simple LMS is a completely custom application that is branded to look and feel like just a page of the ncura.edu website.  The Simple LMS application provides NCURA with a location to host as many courses as they chose to develop and the basic LMS functionality they require (student tracking, final exams, personalized certificates, and basic reports) at a reduced cost.  The course itself is developed in a flash-based authoring tool to create a highly engaging user experience.  The course includes games,activities, quizzes, and custom interactive animations.

Today NCURA's online course provides research administrators with a strong base of knowledge on Federal Contracting. The first offering of the course was in September of 2006 and has been offered again 8 times in 2007. The response to the first course offering was immediate and overwhelmingly positive. Since then, NCURA has decided to move forward on a second course that will also be hosted in the Simple LMS. Fusion was told by Kathleen Larmett, NCURA's Executive Director, "While Federal Compliance regulations were increasing — our members' travel budgets were decreasing. We needed to find a way to provide quality continuing education for all and at a reasonable price. Our on-line tutorial does both."

"Partnering with Fusion let us 'test the waters' at a price we could live with. Our faculty provided the content, and Fusion transformed it into an experience learners loved. We've learned that we have a strong market for this type of course, and look forward to continuing to work with Fusion."

- NCURA staff

Results from the online evaluation sum it up best:

"It was great! The tutorial was very well laid out. Being able to take the course from my own computer was wonderful. I could work at my own pace and when my time allowed."

"It was a terrific way to absorb much substantive information at a learning pace that did not preclude or sidestep ongoing work obligations."

"… I'm just getting into the course and was dreading it, but find I LOVE it! This is a great professional development tool that someone obviously put a great deal of thought into. Thanks!"

Best Practices

• Maintaining and growing your association membership in today's economic environment requires some out-of-the-box thinking about what will best serve members. Offering career growth and development opportunities through online technology solutions supports members' professional needs while saving them travel time and expense. At the same time it can be a revenue enhancement for you by producing member growth and retention.
• Associations are faced with greater budgetary constraints than most corporations. This does not mean however that you cannot still have distance learning capability. Many learning management experts are now saying that it makes sense to approach distance learning strategically, start small, test the waters, and avoid investing in an expensive learning management system that you must host yourself. After all, your real focus should be on providing high quality services to your members!
• Work with a vendor that is in it for the long haul. Value partnership over fast solutions. Make sure your technology partner can grow with you and has the sustainability of your organization as their first concern.