Blog

Implementation Best Practices

mobile
Share:

We have included a few tips to make the Courseplay implementation process smoother for you. Below are a few tips to help manage expectations and prepare for an online training platform:

DESIGN AN IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY

  • Get the right team members on board
  • Gather their feedback
  • Ensure that you are willing able to ultimately deploy the solution you purchase

PREPARE YOUR TEAM FOR DEPLOYMENT AND ADMINISTRATION

  • Assemble a small group (5 or 6 people) that will work on the implementation. These individuals will oversee the administration, technical support, and content management of Courseplay
  • Appoint one person to act as the team leader or single-point-of-contact (SPOC), and another to create a training strategy once Courseplay has been deployed and tested. This team may also include those who help out and serve as advisers on an occasional basis, such as those who use the training system frequently or content creators
  • Usually, organizations will have several people managing the different sectors of the platform. Courseplay allows you to add and modify new user types with unique rights and permissions to make sure that each person has access to everything they need to monitor, whether that is reports, content management, administrative rights and moderation of assignments. Clients sometimes choose to assign a person for each branch in order to have a person responsible over a segment of their training system as a whole, or simply to monitor some specific information over that branch

FORMULATE A COURSEPLAY IMPLEMENTATION TIMELINE

  • Leave sufficient time in the schedule for the Courseplay implementation itself and for problem solving
  • Leave room to get rid of any glitches or address any concerns that may crop up during the deployment phase

DEFINE EXPECTATIONS WITHIN THE TEAM

  • Honest and clear communication between members, to avoid ambiguity in the goal setting process
  • Trust between team members so tasks can be completed without excessive micromanagement

ENSURE YOUR IMPLEMENTATION PLAN WORKS FOR YOUR NEEDS

  • The implementation plan must be flexible to accommodate for new requirements over time. Prepare a list of the all of the tasks that need to be wrapped up during the process
  • Provide any other settings and configuration information that will be pertinent to the deployment of Courseplay using the configuration checklist provided (separate attachment)
  • Specify user profiles, security settings for Courseplay, along with administrator roles, and course structures you will be using

DEFINE EXPECTATIONS AND GOALS FOR COURSEPLAY

  • Include any organizational concerns that Courseplay should address, and objectives that you hope to achieve via the platform
  • Focus on areas of the training system that are higher in priority and ensure that Courseplay is fulfilling its primary purposes

KEEP THE CONTENT READY

  • Not all overnight but basic content gradually
  • Ensure that you have a good amount of content on-hand, so that you can ensure the system is going to serve its primary purpose
  • If you don’t already have a content creation team, then you’ll want to find a content developer who can curate and manage the data within Courseplay
  • Each department within your organization should have a hand in the content that is being integrated into Courseplay

GET ACQUAINTED WITH COURSEPLAY

  • Schedule a basic training session. Be sure to get your training completion certificate once training has completed. In case of a large-scale roll-out, an intermediate course may be needed
  • We use a knowledge base of helpful articles, tutorial videos, our support page and blog to keep in touch with our clients and adapt to the needs of our users which grow alongside the platform

COMMUNICATION AND REGULAR UPDATES

  • Every member of your staff who will be either using or benefiting from Courseplay should have the opportunity to take part in the deployment process
  • Communication is an essential tool both between learners, learners and teachers, as well as administrators and developers in order to drive change where and when it’s needed the most and to make sure the project is running smoothly and on time

DATA MIGRATION (IF ANY)

  • If you already have a Learning Management System (LMS) in place, then you will need to migrate the data to Courseplay. In some cases, data may have to be migrated from an older version of Courseplay to the latest one
  • This must be done in a particular order, so you’ll want to involve both the IT team from your organization and those from the Courseplay support team, in order to ensure that it goes as smoothly as possible
  • Only move the training data that you absolutely need. Migrate your user information and profiles, courseware, the course data, and transcript data

EMAIL PREPAREDNESS

  • Emails are a critical component of Courseplay. For Courseplay to work correctly, two things must be done:
  1. The correct email addresses must be uploaded for all users. If this is not done correctly, email verification will fail and the user will not be able to log in.
  2. The client-side email server must allow emails from the courseplay.co domain. In some cases the domain must specifically be white listed.

TEST COURSEPLAY BEFORE IT GOES LIVE

  • You’ll want to verify that Courseplay works as per your expectations by performing a User Acceptance Test (UAT)
  • Act as though you are the user, and carry out a variety of tasks within the system to ensure that everything goes according to plan
  • Write down all of the functions and processes that will typically be performed within the system by the user and assign a team to test out these specific functions
  • Share feedback and any glitches that come across during the test with our support team (support@courseplay.co)

CONSIDER A SOFT LAUNCH

  • In case of medium-to-large roll-outs, consider launching with between 10 and 50 users first for two weeks before rolling out to the entire organization
  • Record all feedback and share updates with the Courseplay support team

GO LIVE!

Our team will stay with you for the pre-defined hyper-care period. Clients typically only need hand-holding for a couple of weeks before becoming Courseplay masters.