News University
The Poynter Institute
There has perhaps been no other time when relevant, timely training for journalists has been more critical. Ubiquitous media, the explosion of rapid publication platforms, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other digital technologies are changing the ways people consume news. Effective journalism training is critical for equipping media professionals in this changing landscape; and that training has to be highly available, relevant, and as innovative as the field demands.
Enter Poynter's News University
Launched in 2005 with funding support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, NewsU features more than 200 online modules serving more than 140,000 registered users, including 15 percent from outside North America. The NewsU catalog offers faculty-led online group seminars, self-directed courses, Webinars, and other web-based formats, with new courses being rolled out on a monthly basis. After four years of evolving on a mixed platform of ASP, PHP, MySQL, SQL Server, and a proprietary LMS, NewsU began seeking a unified back-end and more effective user interface that would better position the quickly adapting site for continued growth.
NewsU selected Aten Design Group as its design and development partner to redesign NewsU.org, and Drupal was chosen as the technical platform for the upgrade project. Drupal's modular architecture, flexible design capability, support for internationalization, and incredibly active community made it ideal for building the next iteration of site.
Designing the Interface
Users can browse courses in a variety of ways
A new header for “Classic Courses” unifies branding
The new design is striking and clean, providing an effective visual framework for presenting hundreds of available courses. The concept provided a bold new look for NewsU.org, and was coordinated with visual branding efforts already underway at Poynter. Through several iterations, we refined a concept that delivered on identified goals, as follows:
- Effectively reflect the high volume of available training.
- Provide flexibility for NewsU to easily promote specific courses.
- Allow users to find courses in a variety of relevant ways -- searching by keyword, browsing by type, by category, by most popular, and more.
For individual course pages, we created consistent elements for overview information, purchasing options, and tools.
One piece of the design effort was addressing how to bring consistency to almost 200 preexisting, standalone courses that had been developed using a variety of methods, each featuring its own unique look-and-feel, functionality, and technical dependencies. We created a course header for what we called "Classic Courses" -- courses that were not immediately migrated into Drupal. The header provided visual branding consistency, as well as a technical means of embedding necessary permissions management and tracking functionality.
Prototyping Course Functionality
Each Course is an Organic Group, an Ubercart Product, and a Book, all at once
One of the reasons we recommend Drupal so consistently to our clients is the wide availability of community contributed modules that provide functionality for thousands of distinct use cases. Combining single-purpose modules in creative ways can produce complex functionality for near limitless possibilities.
We chose Organic Groups to provide permissions and enrollment management for courses, which are essentially discreet collections of content. Each course is its own Organic Group.
In many cases, courses need to be purchased. We chose Ubercart for e-commerce functionality, and made each paid course a product.
Courses require structure. Unlike typical Organic Groups that might contain a loose collection of posts ordered by most recent date or by topic, courses need well-structured outline-style navigation. To provide needed structure, we used the core Book module.
In essence, each course is an Organic Group, an Ubercart Product, and a Book, all at once. Additional modules provide even more specific functionality; for example, og_expire.module provides time-based subscriptions for some courses. Much of the required functionality for courses was handled by combining existing core and contributed modules, allowing us to focus custom development efforts on improvements and customizations to the user experience.
Tracking User Activity
Effective user tracking is critical to online learning, and NewsU required a sophisticated solution for tracking training minutes per course, per page, per activity, and even per action in some scenarios. We created a flexible tool, built on jQuery, which provides to-the-minute details on user behavior across courses. Data is aggregated for reporting both in users' "My NewsU" area, as well as the administrative back-end. Tracking is automated at the page level throughout the system, and can be added for individual actions on an as-needed basis.
Centralizing the Administration Interface
One of NewsU's biggest frustrations with the previous administration system was a heavily distributed authoring environment for courses. Creating courses required adding content -- often, the same content -- through a minimum of two systems. Now in Drupal, creating and editing courses is handled by a single, unified system.
Migrating 130,000+ Users, Courses, and Course Enrollment
Users, courses, and course enrollment were all imported from NewsU's legacy system, primarily consisting of various SQL Server databases. The data import process was a significant part of the overall effort. We established a migration process early in the project, refining the process throughout, and managed coordinated imports during a multiple-week beta period where the new NewsU.org ran side-by-side with the existing legacy system.
Moving Forward
The redesigned NewsU.org launched publicly in the first quarter of 2010, but work continues. Poynter's News University continues to seek new ways to expand journalism training, leveraging its new technology platform. Not long after launch, we rolled out Training Tip of the Day, a Twitter-enabled feature for promoting courses via brief training tips. In the near future, look for certificate programs for journalists and a syllabus exchange for educators. Later this year, NewsU International will launch, providing multilingual journalism courses.
