From White Glove to Self-Service: How a Community of Practice Prepared University Faculty for a Critical LMS Migration and Digital Transformation

An Instructional Design Case Study in Community of Practice Design, Higher Education Change Management, and Platform Migration Strategy

Portfolio Highlight

Skills Showcased: Community of practice design · Higher education change management · Systems analysis · Platform consolidation strategy · Content management strategy · Faculty development · Adjunct faculty support · SharePoint portal development · Instructional design for higher education · Digital transformation in education

Hero Metric: Migration-ready Faculty Community of Practice delivered ahead of schedule, supporting the institutional transition from a 20-person third-party support team to a 3-person in-house instructional design model across approximately 60 online courses.

Executive Summary

For years, Big Ed's online faculty operated within a comprehensive, white-glove support model: course content hosted, managed, and maintained by Pearson — a leading higher education technology provider — with a specialist team of 10 to 20 people handling everything from content updates to technical troubleshooting. Faculty could focus entirely on teaching. The mechanics behind their courses were someone else's responsibility.

When the university made the strategic decision to bring that infrastructure in-house — with a migration target set for January 2025 — it confronted a stark organizational reality: the new internal instructional design team would number just three people, supporting approximately 60 online courses and their respective adjunct faculty.

The gap between where Big Ed was and where it needed to be was not simply technical. It was cultural. This was a higher education change management challenge at its core. Faculty accustomed to submitting a request and receiving a result would need to become active, informed participants in managing their own course content. The technology platforms used by staff and students were in structural conflict. A global pandemic was reshaping the expectations and habits of everyone involved. And the timeline, while measured in years, was shorter than it appeared.

The answer was a Faculty Community of Practice — a structured digital environment built to prepare Big Ed's online adjunct faculty for the digital transformation ahead. Designed and developed by the institution's first in-house instructional designer, working within a small but growing team, the Community of Practice was built on a Microsoft SharePoint framework, anchored by a systems-informed content management strategy, and guided by a change management philosophy designed to meet faculty where they were — and bring them forward.

By the time the project concluded in mid-2024, the Community of Practice was fully operational. The LMS migration was not just possible — it was planned for, supported by infrastructure, and grounded in a faculty community that understood what was coming and why.

Introduction: The End of White-Glove Support

Big Ed's online programs had long benefited from an arrangement many higher education institutions envy: fully managed course support provided by a dedicated external partner, with a team of specialists ensuring that adjunct faculty could focus entirely on teaching — never on the content management mechanics behind their courses.

This model worked. Until the decision was made to bring it in-house.

The reasons were strategically sound: greater institutional control over course content, long-term cost efficiency, and the ability to align content management with Big Ed's own academic standards and technology infrastructure. But the implications for faculty development and daily operations were significant. A robust external support ecosystem — staffed by 10 to 20 specialists — would be replaced by a three-person in-house instructional design team. Faculty who had never needed to engage with content workflows suddenly would. And in the background, a global pandemic was reminding everyone that "the way we've always done it" was no longer a viable institutional strategy.

When Big Ed brought on its first in-house instructional designer in November 2021, the LMS migration was approximately three years away. That sounds like a comfortable runway. It wasn't.

The Challenge: Five Converging Pressures on Higher Education Change Management

Three years is a long time — until you begin counting everything that needs to happen within it. The Community of Practice needed to address five converging challenges, each of which would have been significant on its own.

The White-Glove Problem: Faculty Expectations vs. Institutional Reality

Big Ed's online faculty were accomplished legal professionals: adjunct instructors who brought deep subject matter expertise to their courses and had neither the time nor the inclination to learn content management systems. Their relationship with Pearson had been transactional and frictionless — submit a request, receive a result.

The coming digital transformation would require something fundamentally different: faculty who understood their own course content architecture, could participate meaningfully in updating it, and could navigate an in-house adjunct faculty support model built for efficiency rather than concierge service.

Some faculty grasped the stakes immediately. Others would need significantly more convincing. And a small number would resist entirely — at least initially.

The Platform Conflict: Google vs. Microsoft in Higher Education

Big Ed's students lived in a Google environment. Its staff operated in Microsoft. This was not simply an administrative inconvenience — it was a structural platform conflict with direct implications for Community of Practice design, content architecture, and communication workflows between faculty, students, and the in-house instructional design team.

Without a clear platform consolidation strategy, any Community of Practice built on top of this divide risked instability, user confusion, and unsustainable maintenance demands on an already lean team.

The Scope Creep Pressure: Building the House Before Furnishing the Rooms

From the outset, there was organizational pressure to simultaneously redevelop existing course content — a significant undertaking that, if pursued prematurely, risked consuming the team's limited resources before the foundational Community of Practice infrastructure was in place.

The institution needed to build the house before furnishing the rooms. Advocating for that sequencing — infrastructure first, content redevelopment second — required both strategic clarity and sustained stakeholder management.

The Technology Wildcard: Evolving Tools in a Moving Landscape

As the project progressed and the in-house team grew, new tools entered the picture — including a recommendation to incorporate YouTube for media hosting. While not without merit, each new tool introduced fresh complexity into a content management strategy that was still taking shape, requiring real-time architectural adaptation without losing design coherence.

The COVID Context: Pandemic-Accelerated Urgency

This project unfolded at the tail end of pandemic-era remote work mandates, with periodic resurgences pushing teams back to fully distributed operations. Far from being a peripheral factor, COVID had accelerated institutional demand for exactly what the Community of Practice was being built to provide: a centralized, accessible, digitally-native support environment for a geographically distributed adjunct faculty community.

The urgency was real. And it was felt across every level of the organization.

The Approach: Systems Analysis and Platform Strategy as Design Foundation

Before a single page of the Community of Practice could be designed, a foundational question needed answering: where would everything live?

The Google-Microsoft divide was not an abstract technology debate — it was a design constraint with concrete implications for faculty adoption, content sustainability, and long-term operational viability. A comprehensive systems analysis was conducted to evaluate the platforms in use across the institution, the workflows they supported, and the practical realities of asking time-constrained adjunct faculty to navigate multiple digital environments.

The recommendation was clear: consolidate to Microsoft, with defined exceptions.

Faculty would continue to communicate across the Google-Microsoft boundary with students — an unavoidable institutional reality that could not be engineered away. But the internal infrastructure of the in-house instructional design team — how course content was organized, stored, updated, and shared with faculty — would be built entirely within the Microsoft ecosystem.

This decision accomplished more than resolving a platform question. It established the architectural terms of engagement for the entire project: a SharePoint-based Community of Practice serving as the central faculty resource hub, OneDrive integration for document management and collaborative workflows, and a content management framework designed to scale with a three-person team supporting 60 courses.

The platform consolidation strategy also required something that good systems thinking always demands — the willingness to defend a well-researched recommendation against the gravitational pull of existing habits, competing preferences, and institutional inertia. And the interpersonal skill to bring stakeholders along rather than simply overrule them.

The Solution: A Community of Practice Built for Three Audiences

With the platform strategy established, the Faculty Community of Practice took shape as a structured digital environment in Microsoft SharePoint — designed to serve simultaneously as a faculty development resource hub for online adjunct instructors, an operational backbone for the in-house instructional design team, and an institutional foundation for long-term content ownership.

For Faculty: From Passive Recipients to Active Participants

The Community of Practice provided adjunct faculty with a centralized access point for course-related resources, support documentation, and communication channels — reducing friction for instructors who needed guidance without requiring deep technical knowledge of content management systems.

Faculty were added as collaborative members of the Community of Practice, giving them appropriate visibility into — and access to — their own course materials for the first time in the institution's online program history. This was a significant shift. Under the Pearson model, faculty had been deliberately insulated from the content layer. Now they were being invited into it.

Critically, the Community of Practice incorporated a structured course update process — a workflow designed to begin the cultural shift from "submit a request and wait" to "here is how you participate in keeping your course current." This was the operational heart of the higher education change management strategy: not mandating adoption, but designing a system where participation felt natural, supported, and worthwhile.

For the Instructional Design Team: Operational Infrastructure at Scale

A content management system (CMS) table was developed to track learning objects across all approximately 60 online courses — providing the small in-house team with the organizational infrastructure to manage a content portfolio previously handled by a team many times its size.

This was not an administrative convenience. It was the operational engine that would make a three-person in-house model viable. Without it, the LMS migration would have meant transferring content without transferring the ability to manage it — a recipe for institutional chaos.

For the Institution: A Documented Content Strategy and Migration Foundation

The Community of Practice established a clear, documented content management strategy — defining how the in-house instructional design team would operate post-migration, how faculty would engage with course updates, and how the organization would manage the transition away from Pearson-supported infrastructure.

It set the stage not just for a platform migration, but for a fundamentally different model of institutional content ownership — one where Big Ed controlled its own course content destiny.

Change Management as Design Principle: Meeting Faculty Where They Were

Faculty were not mandated into adoption. They were invited into participation — a distinction that mattered enormously in a community of independent professionals with competing demands on their time and varying relationships with institutional authority.

The Community of Practice was designed through a human-centered change management lens, recognizing its audience for who they actually were: accomplished subject matter experts with limited bandwidth, minimal instructional technology experience, and — in some cases — limited enthusiasm for being asked to do more.

The most engaged faculty became informal champions — professionals who understood what was at stake and embraced the digital transformation early. Others required individualized support, patient communication, and repeated demonstrations of value. And a small number resisted entirely — until after the project concluded, when several reached out independently for guidance, quietly acknowledging that the transition mattered after all.

That delayed adoption was not a failure. It was evidence that the Community of Practice had been designed with enough staying power and genuine utility to outlast initial resistance.

The Results: Measuring Readiness, Not Pageviews

The Big Ed Faculty Community of Practice was not a project measured in pageviews, login analytics, or engagement dashboards. Its success was measured in institutional readiness — and by mid-2024, with the LMS migration scheduled for January 2025, readiness was precisely what the university had.

LMS migration readiness: Community of Practice infrastructure fully built and operational ahead of January 2025 migration target.

Support model transition: Operational foundation established for shift from 10–20 person Pearson support team to 3-person in-house instructional design model.

Platform consolidation strategy: Microsoft-first content architecture implemented across ~60 online courses.

Faculty onboarding to CoP: Collaborative membership established; structured course update process adopted.

Sustained faculty engagement: Faculty continued to seek guidance post-project — evidence of lasting utility and institutional trust.

Change management validation: Initially resistant faculty independently re-engaged after project conclusion.

Perhaps the most meaningful result arrived quietly, after the formal work was done. Faculty who had initially engaged with hesitation — or not at all — eventually found their way back to the Community of Practice. Not because it was mandated by the institution. Because it was there, and it worked.

The Bigger Picture: What This Instructional Design Case Study Really Demonstrates

Higher education change management has a particular texture that distinguishes it from corporate digital transformation. Faculty are not employees in the traditional organizational sense. They cannot be directed through standard change management playbooks — they must be persuaded. Their subject matter authority is real and hard-earned. Their tolerance for administrative burden is characteristically low. And earning their trust requires demonstrating — concretely and repeatedly — that the change being asked of them serves their interests, not just the institution's.

Big Ed's Faculty Community of Practice succeeded not because it was technically elegant, though the SharePoint architecture was clean and well-designed. It succeeded because it was built with a clear-eyed understanding of its audience: professionals who are expert in their domain, novices in instructional technology, and deeply skeptical of being asked to do more with less.

Meeting that audience required the full learning engineering toolkit — systems analysis, platform consolidation strategy, content management architecture, faculty development design, and the kind of persistent, adaptive change management that doesn't give up when the first wave of resistance arrives.

For educational technologists evaluating this case study: the methodology is transferable across institutional contexts. The challenge of transitioning a community from outsourced support to self-service capability — while maintaining quality, managing resistance, and operating with minimal staff — appears in universities, hospitals, corporations, and government agencies alike. The approach documented here provides a replicable framework for community of practice design in any environment where the people you're asking to change are also the experts you can't afford to lose.

Looking Ahead: AI, Faculty Readiness, and the Future of the Community of Practice Model

The challenge Big Ed's Community of Practice was built to solve — how do you transition a community of online adjunct faculty from dependence on a large external support team to confident, proactive participation in their own course management — is about to become significantly more complex.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping every dimension of online course design in higher education. AI tools can now generate course content, suggest learning objectives aligned to competency frameworks, produce assessments calibrated to cognitive complexity levels, create multimedia learning assets, and simulate student interactions for faculty review. For a three-person in-house instructional design team supporting 60 courses, this is not a threat — it is a force multiplier. But only if the faculty community is prepared to engage with AI tools meaningfully, critically, and ethically.

This is where the Community of Practice model becomes more critical than ever — not less.

The same structural challenges that defined Big Ed's Pearson-to-in-house transition will resurface as AI tools enter the course design workflow. Adjunct faculty with limited time will need curated, accessible guidance on which AI tools are institutionally approved and how to use them effectively. Varying levels of technical comfort will require differentiated support — from AI-curious early adopters to AI-skeptical holdouts. Limited appetite for administrative complexity means AI integration must feel like a simplification, not an additional burden. Faculty AI literacy will become a core competency, not an optional skill — and the Community of Practice is the natural infrastructure for developing it.

Faculty who already understand how their course content is structured, stored, and updated — because the Community of Practice taught them — will be positioned to leverage AI tools effectively and responsibly. Those who don't will find themselves falling further behind, not just technically but pedagogically, as AI-augmented course design becomes the institutional norm.

The Community of Practice is not merely a resource repository. In an AI-augmented higher education landscape, it becomes the infrastructure through which faculty develop AI literacy, share emerging AI-assisted workflows, evaluate AI-generated content against academic standards, and build the collaborative habits that will define the quality of online programs for years to come.

The foundation is in place. The next chapter is ready to be written — and the AI tools available to write it are more powerful, more accessible, and more consequential than anything higher education has had before.

This instructional design case study was developed for portfolio purposes. The institution has been anonymized. All proprietary content, platform implementation details, and identifying information have been removed at the author's discretion. The author served as the institution's first in-house instructional designer, leading Community of Practice design and development, systems analysis, platform consolidation strategy, content management architecture, and higher education change management implementation.