1. Bridging the skills and knowledge gap with continuing education
Many learners find themselves in low-paying, low-skilled jobs with few opportunities for career advancement. As the labor market is changing, learners are required to continuously learn and gain new skills in order to remain professionally agile.
Traditional higher education often poses challenges for these learners due to unaffordable tuition fees or incompatibility with their professional and personal schedules. As a result, a significant number of learners remain unable to acquire new skills required to pursue better career opportunities, and ultimately improve their lives.
Recognizing the need to address this issue, Online Workforce College (OWC), based out of Jones County Junior College in Ellisville Mississippi, has taken the initiative to develop a learning platform consisting of affordable, fully online, and self-paced microcredentials for workforce training. This platform is geared towards working professionals that do not have opportunities to attend traditional higher education institutions, but want or need to acquire additional skills to advance their careers.
Key benefits delivered by Eduframe to OWC:
2. Meet Online Workforce College
Michael Trest
DEAN OF THE ONLINE WORKFORCE COLLEGE
With a strong commitment to addressing the skills gap and providing accessible adult education and training opportunities, Michael Trest, Dean of OWC, has played a pivotal role in setting up innovative solutions for learners seeking to bridge the gap between education and career advancement.
Online Workforce College
Online Workforce College, based out of Jones County Junior College is a fully-online, self-paced learning platform. OWC is designed to provide quality, in-demand, affordable online skills training to individuals to gain a competitive advantage in the workplace leading to improved quality of life, as well as providing employers with a more productive and educated workforce.
“Having a conversation where we can bring value to Eduframe by offering ideas, is the kind of relationship we like to have with our partners. It’s not just Jones College to a vendor, but a partner to partner where we’re both bringing value to each other. I really appreciate what we’ve experienced this past year.”
– Michael Trest, Dean of Jones College’s Online Workforce College
3. Challenge: Scaling skills training program with limited resources
Online Workforce College’s goal was to create bite-sized training modules that could be stacked together for a comprehensive skills training program. The idea behind stackable micro-credentials is to provide skills training modules for people that lack the resources to pursue fulltime education.
To develop this, OWC needed 3 crucial pieces:
- find a way for a small team to manage classes and a large amount of people fully online;
- a strong learning management system;
- a digital credentialing solution.
OWC already had Canvas LMS, thus initially the OWC team opted to use Canvas Catalog as a solution to their challenges. After using Canvas Catalog to its limits, OWC began searching for a more scalable and robust solution. Since OWC offers micro-credentials to both to Jones College students, as well as individuals and organizations outside of Jones College, OWC needed a platform able to accommodate B2C and B2B enrollment flows. Other requirements included:
4. The Solution: The Continuing Education Storefront & SIS for Canvas LMS
September 2021
OWC’s search has led them to Eduframe, the continuing education storefront & SIS for Canvas LMS. Eduframe allows educators to engage prospective students with a stunning storefront, capitalizes on key trends such as micro-credentials & stackable, personalized programs, and provides a 360-degree overview of non-traditional learners.
February 2022
The OWC team decided to make the shift from Canvas Catalog to Eduframe in September 2022. The robustness of Eduframe and the ability to integrate with both Canvas LMS and Salesforce were the crucial factors in their decision to switch. Eduframe provided the ability to manage over 800 individual courses that OWC offers, single sign-on for the Jones College students, and separate sign-up for individuals outside of Jones College.
March 2022
The migration from Canvas Catalog to Eduframe started in March 2022. Throughout the implementation process, there has been intensive collaboration between the OWC team and Eduframe team. OWC needed assurance that they would smoothly enroll their incoming fall freshmen, and Eduframe was able to deliver that. During the migration process, Eduframe retained all of the OWC Canvas (sub-)accounts, helping in a quick transition and resulting in a better organization of accounts than it was before.
“It was a very well-managed and well-organized transition, I appreciated the hand-holding and the guided tours. Throughout the transition process we had a great working relationship with our Eduframe customer success manager who was helping us think through all the different possibilities and ways to manage everything efficiently.”
– Michael Trest, Dean of Jones College’s Online Workforce College
August 2022
Eduframe was launched for OWC. Eduframe team continues to tightly work in collaboration with the OWC team to implement advanced automations through the API as well as quickly resolve any of the support tickets, ensuring OWC is smoothly running at all times.
5. Results
Over the 2022-2023 academic year, OWC continued to grow their use of Eduframe for managing their microcredentials, and even expanded towards face-to-face classes at the Jones County Junior College campus.
Eduframe has helped OWC to deliver a great learner experience: from the first time seeing the website & enrollment, all the way through their student portal and the learning process in Canvas.
Besides the fact that Eduframe helps to improve the learner experience throughout the student funnel, it provides ease of use and flexibility for the administrative staff. Eduframe is built in a way that both technical and day-to-day users are able to leverage the platform for their work. Eduframe has provided an extensive and well-documented API that has allowed OWC developers to tailor and customize the solution to their specific needs. This process is supported by Eduframe engineers, where both OWC and Eduframe teams bring value to each other by offering ideas for improvement. Eduframe has provided the capability for OWC to grow massively.
Michael Trest recognizes that Eduframe is a “very scalable solution that OWC continues to leverage for online offerings. It’s robust enough to grow with us.”
Over the past 4 years, OWC has issued over 165,000 credentials with only 2 members of staff.
6. Future direction
As OWC continues to grow, Michael hopes to grow learner numbers up to 20-30 thousand in the coming years, where Eduframe will be aiding the OWC team in managing those large numbers of learners and learning experiences. Michael is certain that in a year, the OWC team will not be having the same conversation as prior about looking for a more scalable platform: “When we have grown and have more needs, Eduframe is going to continue to grow with us and scale with us”.
