CourseBase

1. Introduction: The Genesis of CourseBase

I had been managing course production and delivery at scale with my team for years. As a department, we were constantly being asked to quantify features of the courses and programs that we built and support. “How many engineering courses do we have?” or “What is the impact of media investment on outcomes?” or similar. The problem was: we had no way to answer the questions definitively because we had never built a method to track all of the components of the courses and programs that we built and supported. What we needed was a coherent system to track not just courses but all of the inputs and outputs of the entire ecosystem. This was the genesis of the CourseBase idea, for which I won a company award that would later become part of our enterprise operations, but that really was just the beginning of a much more important approach to knowledge management.  

2. What Made CourseBase Innovative

The goal for CourseBase was audacious but simple: map all of the components in the academic product ecosystem. We were used to thinking of about courses and programs but we had to adopt a product mindset. Products are made up of components (like parts) and each component has its own corresponding data around supply chain, cost, performance, etc. We needed a system that would not only map the entire landscape of programs and course offerings by term but that would also include things like:

  • Media expenses

  • Design expenses (and hours spent on design and production)

  • 3rd party technologies included and the costs associated

  • Learning Outcomes and more

The only way to ask the “big questions” or to work with big data across all of our offerings was to get granular detail structured in such a way that it could be aggregated and reported upon. So essentially, CourseBase was this holistic system that didn’t just track courses and sessions but actually layered in the resources and investments that went into them. And that allowed us to, for the first time ever, really tie outcomes back to those inputs and see what was working and what was not. Finally, when we looked at the outcomes of a course, whether it's enrollments or student performance or revenue, we could map those against inputs, and we could compare apples to apples across programs and institutions.

Note that, because this was an internal pitch for a contest, we used a Star Wars-themed approach to stand out from the competition. This was before the days when the world suffered from Star Wars fatigue.

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3. Beyond CourseBase: Towards Context-Aware Knowledge Management

There is nothing particularly revolutionary about the idea that, in order to have intelligence, items must be measured. Certainly, this was a watershed moment for our organization as we systemically began to track and report on key features of our products and that we had adapted a product-oriented mindset at all. Many organizations had learned to work this way long ago, however. The goal for CourseBase, however, was much more ambitious than a system to manage inventory and to provide analytics. It was intended to be the foundational layer for a system that would map the content of learning experiences and to build a multidimensional knowledge management tool that could unlock network effects latent in the catalog of learning experiences that we had built.

A fully realized version of CourseBase would have included tagging every unit of every learning experience with the skills that were taught and the level(s) at which they were taught. This could then create a high resolution representation of not just a course or program, but an entire institution. Across the network of all institutions in CourseBase, the feedback loops created by tracking all relevant data related to the experiences that we created had multiple applications:

  • Sales Enablement: Help learners and institutions identify in-demand skills, seek out learning experiences to boost desired skills, partner with institutions to compliment their offerings.

  • Market analysis: track trends across institutions to map in-demand skills to employer-desired outcomes

  • ROI at the level of experience, course, program or institution: compare statistics from learners who complete experiences and the outcomes they achieve with the cost at various levels of granularity.

The goal, once again, was audacious but simple: Create a high-resolution scan of the environments that we supported in order to create a GPS with multiple layers of value for all stakeholders in the ecosystem. Once the entire inventory and all of its components were represented down to the level of skills taught, we could not only “unbundle” courses to remix them, we could also license CouseBase itself as a platform for other institutions to adopt.

4. Reception and Moving Forward

CourseBase was greenlit as a winner of the Innovation Challenge. Ultimately, the first phase was accomplished as we built CODA (the “Course Order Data Application”) which was merely the structured collection of data related to courses that was stored in SalesForce. This unlocked the ability for enterprise teams to pass work back and forth from one team and department to another, to unify the way that time was tracked and billed against courses, and to create analytics dashboards and reports. But, this was only ever intended to be the foundation. The ultimate goal was to build the superstructure upon the foundation, and the goal of the superstructure was to unlock the power of the content—specifically as it was aligned to skills. In a word, “the graph” was the goal all along. Namely, to create a hyper-high-resolution, persistent representation of the meaning housed within the learning experiences we were creating. Up until that point, “Learning Management Systems” were strangely agnostic about the most important ingredient: The Learning. What they were (and still are) are systems to manage learner progress. The actual content, the part of the experience that both professors and students care most about is, in many ways, an afterthought when it comes to these enterprise systems. They exist to manage education operations, to handle enrollments, to gate access to content, to report back to systems of record. The meaning of the learning itself is outside of the purview of these systems. CourseBase was intended to be a groud-up approach to addressing this massive gap in the educational technology landscape. More about that in another post.

CourseBase was just the beginning. If you’re designing educational platforms, building knowledge graphs, or reimagining how learning outcomes are measured and managed—let’s talk.

Meaning, LLC partners with institutions and organizations to engineer context-aware systems that align instructional design, content, and AI. We help you surface the why behind the what—so learners, educators, and platforms can make better decisions.