Channell Walker

Redesigning a Program Around a Single Completion Path

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A faculty development program ran for six cohorts without producing a single completion certificate. Faculty kept signing up. They showed up for the first session, sometimes the second. Then life happened and they disappeared. This held true regardless of how many people signed up. In its highest-enrollment year, nearly two dozen people registered, and the completion count was still zero. Whatever was breaking down, it wasn’t interest.

The team had a theory: faculty weren’t motivated enough to finish. They sent out surveys to find out why. Some faculty responded, but the answers didn’t point anywhere useful. So they tried new names instead. Three of them, over three years. The numbers didn’t move.

When Channell looked at the series, she wasn’t looking for unmotivated faculty. She was looking for the places where the workflow was asking too much of the wrong people at the wrong time.

She found five of them.

The time commitment was unsellable. Six weeks is a long time to ask a busy instructor to stay engaged with anything that isn’t their own course. Channell recommended cutting it to two weeks, scheduled right before summer break, when the end was already in sight. Two weeks felt manageable. Six weeks felt like a course.

The sessions didn’t build toward anything real. Work was scattered across sessions with no single place to track it. Each week covered a different topic, each topic had its own disconnected assignment, and graders had no easy way to see what a participant had already submitted when giving feedback on the next piece. None of it added up to something a participant could hold in their hands at the end. Channell restructured everything around one shared, cumulative file. Each session added a section to the same project, so progress lived in one place and graders could see a participant’s full history just by opening it.

Deadlines fell right after each session, so a missed one left a participant immediately behind for the rest of the program. Deadlines moved to the end of each week, with a single flexible cutoff near the program’s close. That eased pressure on both sides: participants had room to catch up, and graders weren’t fielding a steady trickle of late, disconnected work.

Assignments were open-ended and built for far more time than people actually had. Each one was resized to about an hour, with prompts that pointed straight at the task instead of asking people to figure out where to start. Tasks that used to take hours became 30 to 60 minutes.

The promotion plan had only two stops. Two newsletters, and then silence. Channell mapped every place the audience already showed up: department mailing lists, existing meeting agendas, slides added to workshops people were already attending. A sequence of emails went out automatically in the weeks before launch so registrants didn’t forget they had signed up. Calendar invites sent at registration meant showing up wasn’t something participants had to remember. It was already on their calendar.

Completion went from zero to 25 percent in year one, then to 42 percent the year after. Registration climbed out of the single digits, crossed 30, and stayed there.

With the problems solved, the workshop series had room to grow. Channell noticed an interesting pattern from the data. Some participants came to every session and never submitted a thing. The content mattered to them. The certificate didn’t. That’s a different problem with a different fix: attach the certificate to something people actually want, like public recognition for the work they put in.

She also predicted that the series had a shelf life. In a few years, the people who needed the original content would have it. The recommendation was already on the table: convert the current series to an asynchronous resource and build the next live series around what comes after.

The team wasn’t wrong. They were just too close to see it. The workshop series was overwhelming participants before it ever had a chance to lose them, and no survey was going to surface that. Once the real problem came into focus, the solutions delivered what the team had been reaching for all along: a shorter commitment, a single deliverable worth finishing, and a promotion plan with a larger reach. What started as a completion problem ended as a more valuable program than the one they set out to save. Most teams don’t know what they’re missing until someone outside the room names it. What problem have you been naming and renaming without the numbers moving?