Case Study

Platform Evaluation and Redesign: Creating a Stronger Home for EMT Training

Helping an EMT course provider choose the right platform, upgrade their online presence, and build a stronger foundation for future growth.

The Client

Texas Rescue Med is a provider of emergency services training in the Austin, TX area. Their mission is to cultivate a new generation of highly skilled, compassionate, and adaptable EMS professionals through in-person and online training.

At the time, Texas Rescue Med offered one online course through their own website – the EMT Instructor Course – and others through a third party service that charges high fees per student enrolled.

Texas Rescue Med’s goal was to upgrade the experience of the students for their existing offerings, and set themselves up to scale and eventually move all of their own courses to their own managed platform.

The Problem

Texas Rescue Med initially came to me to help with configuring their existing LMS and website, hosted and built on Squarespace, to offer more advanced functionality. However, when it became clear that Squarespace’s LMS was not yet advanced enough to meet those needs, the client wanted to investigate alternative solutions that would better set them up for the future.

After discussing the potential for the website and where the client hoped to take it in the next several years, we established three main goals:

More Advanced LMS Capabilities

In order to comply with the education requirements for Texas EMS programs, the client needed features like requiring students to spend a certain amount of time on a lesson before passing. In addition, there were certain manual processes that the client hoped to automate, like creating and sending certificates.

Upgraded, Modern Design

The earlier website was simple, but not easy to navigate. For example, the types of courses customers could sign up for and the differences between them were not apparent. The design was also somewhat outdated and the home page didn’t effectively promote the client’s offerings.

Potential for Scalability

Texas Rescue Med offers several offline and online courses. Of the online courses, their previous LMS was only able to support the simplest of the courses. However, the client hoped to move all courses onto their own platform in order to avoid paying high fees to third party platforms, like Pearson, for hosting.

The Solution

Evaluation

The first step in the process was to conduct an evaluation of all of the major Learning Management Systems out there. To do this, I first discussed the list of must-haves and nice-to-haves with the client. Then, I researched the features of the various LMS solutions out there and presented the findings to the client, mapping what met their criteria fully, partially, and not at all, as well as the associated price, and provided a recommendation of WordPress’s LMS plugin, LearnDash.

Website Re-Design

The next step was to re-design the public part of the website – that is everything a visitor to the site can see without creating an account and purchasing the course. The goal here was to create a more descriptive and inviting homepage as well as to make the site easier to navigate and understand. Some of the steps we took were to:

Highlight certain courses on the home page to make it clear what Texas Rescue Med offers up front
Modernize the design and add animations to keep people engaged and build credibility
Create a simple and descriptive menu for visitors to explore the rest of the site.

We also completely re-designed the course pages to make it clear what was included in each offering and the benefits of attending the courses. We broke out the online and in-person course versions using tabs so that customers could easily explore the course type they preferred.

Building the Course

The last step was to set up LearnDash and transfer the existing course, lessons, quizzes, and assignments from SquareSpace to the new LMS. This process also included:

Automating the certification process to reduce manual labor for Texas Rescue Med and provide each student with a personalized certificate
Integrating WooCommerce with the LMS to handle the purchasing process for the courses—since we were already using WooCommerce for the client’s e-commerce store, this created a streamlined process with only one payment gateway for the client to manage.
Transferring the existing students over to the new platform, which required uploading their current progress and records to the new student database and establishing the account creation process.

LearnDash Course Builder Back-End

Student Experience of Sample Course

Certificate with Automated Personalization

The Results

The redesign resulted in a modern, credible website that better showcases the EMT training services and supports online course delivery through a more robust LMS. The client now has a flexible, scalable platform designed to grow with their business.

Use the slider below to view the before and after of the home page.