How Arizona State University launched a new curriculum hub for 1200+ users

“We launched a fully functional intranet app in under two months with Softr. We continue to find new ways to expand its use to more areas of the college operations almost daily.”

Derek Thurber

Principal Teaching + Learning Specialist Arizona State University (MLFTC)

The Problem

The main goal of updating the curriculum hub at Arizona State University was to improve the quality of educational programs by increasing connections across courses and programs.

Because each course or program was teaching its own content in isolation, it was often hard for students to understand where they were at with their current knowledge and experience, and what the next possible steps were in their educational journey.

Before trying out Softr, Derek Thurber — the Principal Teaching + Learning Specialist at the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching & Learning Innovation — and his team relied on Airtable and Google Sheets to organize information. However, they faced some key challenges:

• No standardization: Multiple data sources were used, and how users entered the data wasn’t regulated.
• Challenging user experience: It was tricky for users to enter, update, or interpret information within a complex Airtable setup.
• Lack of permissions: More advanced access and edit permissions were needed than what Airtable provided, based on the user’s role and faculty title (e.g. a group of users can see all the program details, but can update info only in their own program).
  

The curriculum hub team was looking for a solution that could effectively address all these challenges.

The Solution

Derek and his team found that the combination of Softr and Airtable allowed them to stick with the data management approach they'd already been familiar with, and also address the standardization, complexity, and permissions challenges they’d been facing.

With the current curriculum hub setup, Softr provides the same easy-to-navigate interface to all users and allows them to apply the necessary level of permission on data input and updates.

Most importantly, Softr allows them to translate raw data into clean, interactive, and custom user interface. The way Softr organizes data into dynamic directories makes it easy for users to search and filter massive amounts of data to find what they need in a matter of seconds.

For Derek, the two defining characteristics of Softr that made him choose the platform have been its usability and flexibility. The team had tried several other no-code tools, but they’d been either too complex for non-tech users or had too many limitations, which didn’t allow them to implement the curriculum hub requirements.

“We can now let certain users update course and program information without Airtable access, helping us keep data up-to-date in real time.”

Derek Thurber

Principal Teaching + Learning Specialist Arizona State University (MLFTC)

The Impact

In the first month after launching the curriculum hub, more than 1,200 unique users accessed the platform, 195 of which created accounts to get full access to features and data. These numbers equate to approximately 40% of the total faculty and staff user base and over 90% of the users whose core responsibilities revolve around the curriculum.

The rapid rate of adoption has shown the value of a custom curriculum hub and team intranet. The team is working to identify more ways to summarize and visualize data across courses and programs, to enhance and improve the data-driven decision-making facilitated by the platform.

“We can now standardize how courses and programs are described and organized in a machine-readable format and visualize those connections for end-users," said Derek. "This means users can see and understand those connections and act on them in their teaching and learning.”