Owning school council eLearning end to end for a state education department

The situation

The department's school council training ran on a Drupal-based portal that the studio hosted and managed. The department asked for two new modules about students on school councils and short videos explaining two council governance tools, and later an admin view for principals and content updates.

My role

I was responsible for the work from start to finish. The studio's director wrote the module scripts and a colleague helped with the design and build. The rest was mine: script edits, narration, video editing and subtitles, most of the build, testing, delivery, the principal admin view and the 2025 updates.

What I did

Produced and built the student modules

I edited the director's scripts, then generated the narration from the voiceover text with text-to-speech tools. I edited the videos and added subtitles. A colleague and I designed and built the modules in Rise 360, with me doing most of the build.

Tested, fixed and released them

The modules went through several review rounds between late 2022 and early 2024. I tested each version and fixed what came up, from on-screen text to moving long transcripts into expandable text. The final round was on-screen text only, but about half of it sat inside the videos, which made those edits slower.

After I posted the final review links, the department's reviewer couldn't see any of the changes. I traced it to a cache on the server still serving the old version, fixed it and re-sent the links.

During review I set the modules up on the LMS, unreleased, so the department's contact could check how they looked. The department approved both modules in March 2024, subject to one image change. I made it, updated the staging page and the LMS, and made the modules live on 26 March 2024. They were later carried over to the new Moodle platform.

Set up a school admin view for principals

In 2024 I worked out how the LMS could let principals see the learners from their own school: make the principal's account a school admin linked to their school. With about 400 principals and 1,614 schools registered, I flagged that setting this up by hand, at 10 minutes or more each, would be slow. In August I set up a test account for the department to try the admin view, wrote a user guide for it, and matched the principals registered on the LMS against the department's own list.

Delivered two explainer videos

For a video on a council self-assessment tool, I shared the first draft in December 2022, with a computer-generated voice for review, and delivered the final version in February 2023. In April I made it public so the department could embed it on its policy page. For a second video in 2023, on a council declaration tool, I recorded the screen captures, passed them to a video editor brought in for the job, then published the finished video to Vimeo and shared it with the department. I later rebuilt both tools, covered in Rebuilding two governance tools for school councils.

Ran the 2025 content updates

In June 2025 I made the requested changes to one of the core modules, the mini modules and the student modules, and posted each set for review. The department approved them all on 18 June, with one small banner change, and the updates went onto the LMS.

What I'd do differently

• Check review links from outside the studio first. The cache issue only came to light when the reviewer saw an old version. Opening each link the way the client would, logged out in a private window, would likely catch that.
• Ask early whether changes touch text inside videos. Text that's part of a video takes far longer to change than plain text. Knowing up front gives a more accurate timeline.

Tools and skills

• eLearning production: Articulate Rise 360, script editing, text-to-speech narration, video editing and subtitles
• Delivery: testing, fixes, staging review pages, LMS setup and release
• LMS administration: a Drupal-based LMS (roles, school accounts, data matching), later Moodle; Vimeo hosting
• Documentation: a user guide for the admin view