Case study // Jamie Warren
The MKT-120 Course Build
Sixteen modules of a marketing course needed lesson content in Moodle. The acceptable answer was a stack of PowerPoints or flat Moodle Lessons. Nobody would have faulted it. I built something better instead, and two years of gradebook data says the bet paid off.
At a Glance
| Role | Sole designer and developer |
| Context | MKT-120 (Principles of Marketing), Blue Ridge Community College, delivered in Moodle |
| Tools | Articulate Rise 360 with embedded Storyline 360 blocks; SCORM completion passback to the Moodle gradebook |
| Timeline | Built Summer 2025 |
| Artifact | Sample module (2.1 Strategic Planning) available on request |
The Problem
This was a volunteered standard, not an assigned one. The course needed lesson content, and the path of least resistance — slide decks or Moodle’s flat Lesson pages — was fully acceptable to everyone involved. But students were going to live in this course for a semester at a time, the college held paid Articulate licenses that were otherwise idle, and I had the skills to use them. The real question wasn’t “what does this course require?” It was “what’s the best thing the available capacity can produce?” So I made hay while the sun shined.
Constraints
- Sixteen modules, one designer — consistency of voice, architecture, and quality had to hold across a full course arc, not just a showcase lesson
- Moodle delivery — everything packaged as SCORM with reliable gradebook passback, built to run unattended after handoff
- Interaction matched to cognitive task — no interactivity for its own sake; each interactive had to earn its slot
The Approach
Rise 360 is the spine: consistent navigation, readable typography, block-level pacing across all sixteen modules. But the defining decision is what happens inside the lessons — choosing among three interaction technologies per task rather than defaulting to one. The Strategic Planning module (2.1) shows the pattern in a single lesson sequence: Rise-native blocks where reading and watching suffice; a card-sort interaction for the BCG Matrix, because sorting products into quadrants is the skill the matrix teaches; and full Storyline blocks embedded where the interaction needed more than Rise offers — three of them in that module alone, covering mission/vision/values, the BCG Matrix, and SWOT analysis.
The assessment design is deliberately two-tier. The interactives are practice, not tests — students explore the sorts and scenarios without grade pressure, and the Storyline blocks report no scores at all. The SCORM layer passes back exactly one thing: binary completion, 1 or 0, counted as the lesson’s participation grade. Low-stakes interaction, simple accountability. The gradebook asks only “did you engage”; the learning happens where the grades aren’t watching.
The Result
The modules have now run unattended for three consecutive semesters — Fall 2025, Spring 2026, and the current Summer 2026 sections — with completion passback still reporting cleanly. No maintenance calls, no broken packages, no gradebook mysteries. For SCORM content in a production LMS, a year of silence is the loudest possible metric. The claim is deliberately scoped: this is completion tracking, not score reporting, because that is what the assessment design called for and that is what the data shows.
Looking Back
The build proved that hybrid authoring scales to a full course, but it also taught me where the real cost lives: not in the first module, in the fourteenth. Consistency across sixteen modules came from discipline rather than system — the reusable engines and component libraries I built afterward for the Canvas migration are partly a response to feeling that cost by hand. If I built MKT-120 today, the module template would exist before module one.
Artifacts
- Sample module: 2.1 Strategic Planning — available on request
- Related: Moodle Lessons → SCORM · Wall & Partition Assembly