 Hi everyone, I'm Satara and I am a researcher on the product experience team. I recently wrapped up a research study on course creation. I'll be sharing a little bit about with you today. So the purpose of the study was to better understand the course creation journey and the people who are creating courses in a higher education environment. And through understanding that journey, identify the biggest pain points and opportunities for improving that experience. So originally we set out to define the course creation journey. But based on the participants that we interviewed, we were able to identify four distinct types of users that approach course creation in different ways. And, you know, they might have different goals and challenges when they're creating courses. We're calling these different user types the newbie, the recycler, the creator, sorry, the recreator and the creator. So one important thing to call out here is that these don't necessarily represent distinct people. There might be people out there who identify with one or the other or maybe a mix of one or two. You know, one year you might be a recycler the next year you might be a creator you might progress through these user types. They're really not meant to represent individuals but they're more indicative of different approaches that can be taken when creating courses. So the newbie is someone who is probably new to course creation, new to the organization and even new to the LMS. They have challenges knowing where to start. They have challenges with learning the LMS and also not having a lot of guidance or support when they're being started. They can often feel very overwhelmed by the amount of choice and the complexity that's involved in course creation and that's available on the LMS. And they often learn by making mistakes. The recycler is someone who's maybe more familiar with the LMS than the newbie but isn't an advanced user. They most often will be just resetting the courses year after year changing dates and making very small tweaks. We suspect that this is a very common user type or common approach. They may also be a little bit intimidated by the LMS kind of like the newbie. So they tend to stick to what they know. The recreator is someone who is more comfortable with the LMS and they may even be a power user. So they very often will be revamping or reimagining their courses year after year to improve them. They're looking to keep things fresh not just for their students but for themselves and they tend to enjoy experimenting with new ways to present their courses. That said they're also very strapped for time like everyone we talk to all the different user types and so they try to reference and reuse materials whenever they can versus creating from scratch. And lastly we have the creator who is most likely a power user probably in a role where they're creating courses as a part of their main job and helping other instructors create courses as well. So they have a lot of knowledge about online pedagogy and pools. They will often prefer to create courses from scratch rather than editing and revising existing courses. Their expertise with the LMS allows them to be more creative and experimental. So the user type that we ended up learning the most about in these interviews is the recreator. That doesn't necessarily mean that most of our users are recreators. We just happen to interview more of those in this research. One of the steps, one of our next steps will include trying to get a sense of how these different types might apply in a broader sense to our, try to keep me out of the meeting, how it applies to our broader user base. But from what we learned I was able to put together a journey map for their course creation journey. I'm not going to read through everything but for anyone who wants to take a closer look, the links to the report and the journey map are on the first slide of this section of the slide deck. So there are eight steps in the journey. Just overall they are going through the process of defining objectives, gathering materials and resources, planning and preparing and organizing those resources, actually building out the course and then reviewing and revising it before it goes live. After it goes live they're monitoring throughout the semester for any problems or issues that may arise or problems that students might be having with anything in the course. Then they're also modifying the course throughout the semester. So they might be just making small tweaks based on what they learn in the monitoring phase but also they might just be creating content throughout the semester as they go. And then at the end of the semester they're just wrapping up in the conclude phase. So making some notes about what they might change in the future, reviewing student feedback and just getting prepared to teach the course again the next year. So each of these phases, if you want to dig into them, what you'll see here is just a recap of what the user needs in the phase, what are some of the actions they're taking in the phase, and then what are some things that are kind of getting in the way, what are the challenges that they're experiencing. In terms of the outcome or result, through mapping the course creation journey and sort of understanding the challenges of the different user types, we learned that some of the biggest challenges when creating courses stemmed from difficulties with content management. So creating, sharing, adding, reusing and editing content. Our next step will be doing some further validation, like I mentioned, of these user types, and then diving deeper into the content management experience more specifically and looking for ways to improve those workflows and the overall experience. So that's it for this recap. Like I said before, if anyone is interested in diving into the actual report, there's a lot more in there. And if you want to look at the journey map as well, the link to both of those are on the first slide. And if you have any questions, as always, feel free to reach out. But that's it for me. Thank you so much.