Migration from Smart Sparrow

The Smart Sparrow adaptive eLearning platform that allowed academics to develop rich, interactive online learning activities. Adaptive tutorials had been developed for most courses in Physiology, and this supported the rapid shift to online learning in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, with the sale of Smart Sparrow to Pearson Education, it was necessary to migrate all the content to another platform. The migration was critical to the continued delivery of many courses in the discipline of Physiology and I was responsible for leading this effort. This involved recruiting post-graduate students who had recent experience of courses in Physiology to recreate the activities in Moodle quiz. I created training sessions on the technical requirements and the design of learning activities, and empowered the students to provide their input to the activities from their personal experience. These training resources were shared with other disciplines who were also migrating content. The students were supported with regular design sessions, where a learning activity was presented and critiqued as a workshop activity, to build skills, knowledge of the limitations and solutions for delivering engaging activities in Moodle quiz. Recreating the activities also provided an opportunity to ensure greater accessibility, with inclusion of transcripts for videos. Academics were kept up to date with progress, and reviewed the new learning activities as they were being developed to ensure that the learning outcomes and aims were being achieved. The students also provided testing of functionality to ensure answers, feedback and branching of activities worked as expected. As a result, 48 Smart Sparrow modules were migrated to Moodle quiz, over a period of 10 weeks between October and December 2020. All migrated learning activities were available for teaching in 2021.