Holmes Corporation: Customizing education and certification with Machine Learning

Holmes Corporation: Customizing education and certification with Machine Learning

Case Study

 

Customizing education with Machine Learning

Holmes Corporation

Holmes Corporation partnered with SDG to customize their professional education and certification program using machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Challenges

Varying data sources
Access to actionable data in real-time
Limited capacity & tight timeline

SDG Solutions

AI and ML learning models
Model-ready data sets
Consumer personas
Data lakes in Azure

Elevating the learning experience

Holmes Corporation (HC) designs and delivers personalized and adaptive educational products for individuals worldwide seeking professional credentials and certifications. Through strong partnerships with professional associations, colleges, universities, and other global training providers, they have helped more than 2 million professionals in more than 200 countries prepare for and earn globally recognized credentials. HC’s association partners’ members are busy professionals with diverse job functions and varying levels of education and career seniority. The time they can allocate to professional development and learning is limited, so delivering training solutions that target their knowledge gaps is critical.

Operating for more than 50 years, HC has amassed a vast storehouse of training content, performance data, and consumer information. HC’s technology and product leaders wisely identified that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technology might help them better utilize this data, using learners’ time more efficiently while still teaching and assessing the necessary professional skills. To explore these new concepts, HC augmented their in-house talent with targeted AI and ML technical expertise from SDG.

Assessing Data Readiness

After exploring the complexities of HC’s market and business, SDG assessed HC’s data systems and sources. SDG’s analysts recommended that HC consolidate their data sources by building data lakes in HC’s Microsoft Azure cloud environment. This critical step normalized data from varying sources into a clean, centralized, model-ready dataset.

Co-exploring possibilities

SDG and HC then collaborated to explore ways to use this data to address high-potential business opportunities. Together, they paired technical analysis with research into the user experience to address the business goals of HC’s professional association customers and their member-learners.

Highlights of Co-exploration

  • The SDG and HC teams used ML clustering techniques to identify and develop consistent pathways based on learner classifications (based on learner profile data) and guide the user experience.
  • Using a Machine Learning model, SDG consultants created an explainability analysis to identify an optimal study path for each student persona.

Building the solution

The descriptive modeling that helped HC understand their students served as the foundation for the next step: creating a more adaptive and personalized “My Study Plan” solution, using AI and ML technology and techniques.

This enhanced system combined best practices from the field of educational data mining with individual student performance data to recommend specific content to individual students. Essentially, the team deployed an AI model at an online endpoint, where, based on the student’s most recent study results, API calls generate real-time recommendations advising each student on where to focus their study time.

Our collaboration with SDG helped us expedite the incorporation of AI and ML technologies into our products to deliver a more adaptive and personalized learning experience to our customers and a leading-edge product for our association partners. These enhancements have contributed to a 35% reduction in required study time for learners by focusing on their knowledge gaps and have improved certification exam performance. SDG’s consultants were great partners not just in technical development, but in machine learning strategy and system design.

Elizabeth Moore, VP Product Development

Holmes Corporation

An adaptive, streamlined experience

The enhanced “My Study Plan” ensures that each student has a personalized educational path that meets their unique learning and assessment needs while making most efficient use of their time. To confirm the model is performing as intended, the SDG team built monitoring dashboards using Azure Responsible AI for the HC team to leverage. The entire system allows HC and its clients to understand model performance, examine model predictions and real-world outcomes, and ensure optimal outcomes for HC, their professional association customers, and those associations’ member-learners. With these advancements, HC is setting a new standard in professional education, empowering learners to achieve their goals with precision and confidence.

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Yale University: Ivy League Portal Product

Yale University: Ivy League Portal Product

Case Study

 

Ivy League Portal Product

Yale University

One of the world’s most prestigious universities partnered with SDG to evaluate, select, and implement a portal framework to serve its campus community — in just six weeks.

Challenges

Diverse customer personas
High-end experience needs
Compressed timelines

SDG Solutions

Platform architecture
Digital strategy
Portal implementation
Responsive UI development

World-class university partners with SDG on a digital portal product

Selecting a platform on which to develop your campus infrastructure is no easy task. Yale University, one of the world’s most selective and prestigious universities, wanted to create a centralized, digital “hub” as the starting point for the online services they offered to support their students, faculty, and staff.

Through an internal evaluation process, Yale’s IT team compared options and selected finalists. But to make their final selection and begin the implementation, they wanted the first-hand knowledge that comes with implementation experience and understanding of portal architectures for the unique needs of higher education. So Yale turned to SDG.

Comprehensive requirements

  • Theming and customizable HTML & CSS
  • Responsive design and mobile accessibility
  • Targeted content by role
  • Plugin architecture for custom development
  • Communities and social capabilities for blogs, micro-blogging and forums
  • Internal and external system integration
  • Federated authentication
  • Cloud-based hosting

SDG roles

  • Agile project delivery
  • Application architecture and development
  • Fully responsive user experience development
  • Documentation and training

Technologies used

  • Amazon Web Services
  • Spring & Spring MVC Portlet
  • Ant
  • Maven
  • Alloy UI
  • Bootstrap
  • HTML5
  • Sass
  • SalesForce
  • Tomcat
  • MySQL

The solution

Yale had developed evaluation criteria to compare portal options. These criteria included a defined set of user stories, an assessment of the system’s user experience and user interface capabilities, as well as integrations with both Salesforce and ServiceNow. The comparison was time-boxed as a six-week effort.

SDG was chosen to partner with Yale through the evaluation and represent the portal product team throughout this evaluation. Over the course of the project, SDG guided the portal implementation from requirements through implementation and documentation. Additionally, Yale relied on SDG’s deep portal and higher education experience to provide a strategic perspective on building an implementation team and understanding the total cost of ownership.

All images provided by Yale University. Photo credits: “Campus Walk” by Dan Renzetti; “Bass Tower” by Jack Devlin; “Directed Studies Orientation 2015” by Michael Marsland.

To read more success stories, visit the our work page.

A Digital Campus for Higher Education (Company Confidential)

A Digital Campus for Higher Education (Company Confidential)

Case Study

 

A Digital Campus for Higher Education

Online university (company confidential)

A leading online university partnered with SDG to build a complete campus experience, digitally.

Challenges

Heavily regulated industry
Complex integrations
Multiple user types
Building a community

 

SDG Solutions

Project delivery
Solution architecture
Application development
DevOps & Infrastructure

 

More than just a portal, an online university needed a digital campus

Online universities depend on digital technology to deliver the entire higher education experience to their students, including facilitating learning, assesing students, supporting collaboration, and managing the many administrative and support functions of campus life, from financial aid to registration to libraries and research.

Our customer is one of the world’s most successful and prominent online-only universities. It recognized that its portfolio of technologies and services from different vendors was creating a disjointed and ineffcient experience for students. Students needed to use an ERP system for adminstrative transactions, a Learning Management System (LMS) for online courses, and other third-party and homegrown resources for advising, student support, and other services.

Facing pressures from both users and competitors, they planned to implement a new digital experience, which they envisioned as a virtual campus, to unify all the resources and tools necessary for students and faculty to succeed.

The campus vision

The university’s digital product and technology teams collaborated with SDG to implement a vision that included essential components of the university experience:

  • Academic learning through a third-party Learning Management System (LMS).
  • Adminstrative tools from Student Information Systems (SIS) and ERP applications.
  • Academic support resources including both third-party and custom-made web resources.
  • A private community of students, faculty, and alumni, including discussions, contacts, and academic groups.

And they needed the new system to be:

  • Personalized and user-friendly
  • Easy to integrate with existing technologies
  • Flexible, reliable, and state-of-the-art
  • Supportive of academic progresses

Building the solution together

After analyzing over 40 different objectives, the SDG team customized a solution that delivered the vision of university leadership. Recognizing the need for efficiency, speed and reliability, SDG recommended and then implemented a Java-based portal framework to serve as the university’s new platform. In addition, SDG and university technologists devised a service-oriented architecture (SOA) layer to connect existing systems and allow data to flow freely between them. Finally, SDG provided quality assurance to ensure a smooth rollout to the entire university community.

Benefits of the new system

  • Upgraded personal and professional networking features
  • On-demand access to information
  • Easy navigation between platforms
  • Enhanced interface and virtual university experience
  • Communities functionality, including profiles, groups, discussions, and chat

Roles played by SDG

  • Strategic alignment
  • Program planning and project delivery
  • Infrastructure and tool selection
  • User experience design
  • Application development and integration architecture
  • Off-shore quality assurance management

Technologies used

  • Java
  • Liferay Enterprise
  • Portal PeopleSoft ERP
  • Blackboard
  • AJAX
  • Spring WebServices
  • Hibernate
  • Offshore Testing
  • Agile Project Management

A Note on Confidential Case Studies

This customer preferred that we keep their identity confidential, so we haven’t named them in this case study. While we’re proud of our work on this project, SDG respects our customers’ wishes.  

All photographs courtesy of Unsplash.

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library: Preserving Ancient Manuscripts

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library: Preserving Ancient Manuscripts

Case Study

 

Preserving Ancient Manuscripts with Technology

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library

St. John’s University’s Hill Museum and Manuscript Library and SDG collaborated on a web-based application for cataloging ancient manuscripts.

Challenges

Audience of global scholars
Complex visualizations 
Archival quality and accuracy
Grant-based funding sources

SDG Solutions

Digital strategy
Technical architecture
Mobile product development
User experience

Using modern software to manage ancient documents

Since 1965, the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University (SJU) has been dedicated to the preservation of manuscripts from around the world through the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML).

Specifically, HMML’s scholars have sought out areas where historical artifacts are in danger—whether through disaster, conflict, or other circumstances. Their goal is to ensure that these texts remain intact for the future.

While printed texts can be found in various libraries and museums, manuscripts are unique, hand-written documents, whose value is immeasurable for scholars of paleography, codicology, and numerous other disciplines.

Cataloging such documents involves taking high-resolution photographs of each page and providing detailed bibliographic information for reference.

In accordance with the Benedictine tradition, SJU scholars have continually aimed to make use of the best available technologies. So as they planned how to preserve manuscripts with an audience of global scholars, they sought to incorporate such technologies into their library.

    Partnering with SDG to deliver a Virtual Reading Room

    HMML’s vision was a Virtual HMML Reading Room (vHMML)—a unique web application where global scholars could view manuscripts, share research, and work with local, on site staff to archive new materials from active worksites. It was essential that the new format would allow for the digital reproduction and cataloging of manuscripts before they faced destruction.

    HMML partnered with SDG create this solution. The goal: to create a cloud-hosted solution that would allow HMML staff to easily update website content and provide an updated look in anticipation of increased web traffic following a featured story on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

    For an institution that is completely funded by grants and donations, national media coverage of this magnitude represented a unique opportunity to expose the work HMML was doing to a massive audience of potential donors. With this in mind, one additional goal was to guarantee that the site could continue to deliver content with low latency during a flood of traffic. All of these goals had to be accomplished under a tight timeline with an unmovable deadline: the site had to be live when the 60 Minutes episode aired.

     

    The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library virtual reading room

    Global reach

    As of 2017, HMML is actively collecting manuscripts from Mali, Egypt, Ethiopia and a number of locations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.  At the time SDG was engaged to help with this project, the effort to create the new system had been underway for over 18 months as a collaborative effort between 3 separate teams who were struggling to produce a viable product.

      Ambitious goals

      HMML and SDG collaborated to achieve these goals:

      • Provide a fresh look that aligned with HMML branding
      • Include an interactive map & manuscript tour
      • Present a stronger, more cohesive visual mission statement
      • Allow for simple content management
      • Remove on-premise IT dependency
      • Guarantee uptime under heavy load
      • Deliver content with low latency for all of HMML’s global audience
      • Support any device

          A full range of skills

          SDG used a full complement of product skills throughout the partnership. including:

          • Agile project delivery and management
          • Business analysis
          • Quality assurance
          • UI/UX design
          • Enterprise architecture and application development
          • Infrastructure/DevOps support
          • Documentation and training

           

            An elegant, scalable solution

            The resulting solution was a WordPress website running in the AWS Cloud on Amazon EC2, RDS, SES and CloudFront.

            WordPress delivered the simple content management capability that HMML desired and AWS services provided a way to quickly implement enterprise grade solutions to the infrastructure, delivery and performance goals of the project. While using the available funds in a responsible way and managing a very aggressive timeline SDG was able to create a site with an elegant design and an architecture that could scale to meet demand.

            The new solution features:

            • A branded, user-centric user interface
            • Cross-device compatibility
            • Administrative tools and security to manage content creation
            • Cloud deployment to eliminate IT dependency
            • Comprehensive keyword search
            • Global caching of content at edge locations around the world
            • Continuous integration pipeline management

            All images courtesy of Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

            To read more success stories, visit the our work page.