CaseStudy - SNHU - Atomic Learning Blogs

Southern New Hampshire
University
Using Video Tutorials to Train Faculty in Record Time
Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) serves more than 40,000 students from its
campus in Manchester, New Hampshire. While some students take traditional courses in
a campus setting or from satellite branches, nearly 37,000 take classes online.
SNHU uses Blackboard LearnTM for their campus Learning Management
System and it has become increasingly important as the university
grows its online offerings. Blackboard is now an integral part of the
educational experience as faculty use it extensively for online courses.
When Blackboard came out with the latest software upgrade, the
university’s technology team needed a way to quickly train the entire
faculty on the changes. Due to a recent organizational restructuring,
the team had limited time to get the new training program in place.
In the past, the university would create PDF documents and their
own videos for the staff – along with quizzes – but they had no way of
knowing if faculty were viewing the materials or learning the changes.
Also, because of the very short timeframe, there was not enough time
to create the needed materials.
Bill Harlow, Director of Academic Technology at SNHU,
university used the grading feature within Blackboard to
knew the university was already using Atomic Learning in
pull data on the back end to see which faculty completed
a limited capacity and that expanding its use would be the
the training. “We had a 90 percent completion rate within
right solution. Atomic Learning is an online technology-
the first 30 days,” said Harlow.
training provider focusing on higher education. Colleges
and Universities can gain annual access to more than
65,000 online tutorials that educate viewers on how to
use and apply many different types of technologies used
in higher education, including the Blackboard Learn
platform. Students, faculty, and staff can view one specific
With Atomic Learning, the university was able to brand the
training to look like programs faculty had used in the past.
In the first few days of the launch, the team only had a few
questions from faculty, but using Atomic Learning allowed
them to quickly adjust the program to address those issues.
tutorial, or watch all of the tutorials in a series and gain a
Three days to roll out such an extensive training program
certificate of completion.
may seem unrealistic, but according to Harlow, Atomic
When the Blackboard upgrade became available, Harlow
saw an opportunity to use the new Atomic Learning Building
Learning made it easy. “It’s pretty straight forward,” said
Harlow. “Atomic Learning is very easy to use.”
Block to fully integrate the solution with Blackboard. “The
Now that Atomic Learning is being used within Blackboard,
entire training program had to be up and running in three
more faculty are using it for professional development and
days,” said Harlow. “I knew Atomic Learning was very
to help students learn new concepts. “Atomic Learning
scalable, had great integration with Blackboard, had high
makes it easy for us to upload our own custom videos into
quality videos, and allowed reporting so we could see who
the system, giving our videos the same features and ease-
completed the required videos.”
of-use as Atomic Learning’s videos,” said Harlow. “We can
With a limited staff, Harlow and his team created a list of
the changes to Blackboard. They then went into Atomic
then mix and match our videos with theirs to get the results
we need for faculty and students alike.”
Learning to match videos to those changes. “Assembly was
Students and faculty can access Atomic Learning by
fairly easy as Atomic Learning already had the videos we
clicking a tab within Blackboard, or through a portal on the
needed,” said Harlow. “It was just a matter of clicking on
university’s website. “We tried to make it as easy to access
the videos we wanted to include.”
as possible from any location,” said Harlow. “Now that the
The team created a training program using five to six
modules with each module consisting of a series of Atomic
Atomic Learning brand is better known with faculty, we
expect its use to grow with students as well.”
Learning videos and a quiz SNHU created at the end.
Faculty were required to complete at least 75 percent of the
videos before they could take the quiz and move on to the
next module. Once all of the modules had been completed,
faculty members received a certificate.
“We used Blackboard as a delivery platform for the
training,” said Harlow. “Each of the more than 2500 faculty
could complete the training on their own time.” The
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