Digital build of two King's College London online programmes
Owning the platform build for two sequential 6-month programmes — from Canvas configuration through launch — plus the workflow and learner-support decisions that changed how the team produced courses.
Project overview
FourthRev partnered with King's College London to deliver online programmes. I owned the platform build for two sequential 6-month programmes — taking content from the learning design team and turning it into fully built, tested, launch-ready Canvas courses.
The role spanned the whole production pipeline: Canvas configuration, page build with HTML/CSS, QA, launch readiness, and the post-launch uplifts that came out of running live cohorts. Along the way I made workflow and learner-support decisions that changed how the wider team produced courses.
Key features & outcomes
- Owned the end-to-end Canvas build for two sequential 6-month KCL online programmes
- Configured Canvas, built pages with HTML/CSS, and prepared each programme for launch
- Established build workflows and standards that the wider team adopted
- Made learner-support decisions informed by live cohort experience
- Delivered post-launch uplifts based on what running the live programmes revealed
Two sequential 6-month online programmes for King's College London had to be built in Canvas to a university partner's standards, on a delivery timeline, and ready for live cohorts. The learning design team produced the content; someone had to turn that content into fully built, tested, launch-ready courses.
This was a build-ownership role: responsible not just for assembling pages, but for the Canvas configuration, the HTML/CSS quality, the QA, the launch readiness, and the decisions about how the build process itself should work across two programmes running back to back.
Owned the full build pipeline. From taking learning-design content through to a launch-ready Canvas course: configuration, page build, formatting, QA, and launch prep. Owning the whole pipeline meant the quality and consistency decisions sat in one place.
Built with HTML/CSS for control. Going beyond Canvas's default page editor with custom HTML/CSS gave the programmes a consistent, polished look and made the pages easier to maintain and update across two programmes.
Turned the second build into a better process. Running two programmes sequentially meant the first build taught me what to standardise for the second. I established workflows and standards that the wider team then adopted — making future builds faster and more consistent.
Let live cohorts inform the work. Post-launch uplifts came directly from seeing how learners actually used the courses. Running the live programmes surfaced improvements that no amount of pre-launch QA would have caught.
Owning the build means owning the workflow. The most valuable output wasn't the two courses — it was the build process and standards that the team kept using afterwards. Build ownership is partly a process-design role.
HTML/CSS pays off at scale. Investing in custom build quality early made every subsequent page and uplift easier. The control was worth the upfront effort.
Live cohorts are the real QA. Pre-launch testing catches the obvious problems; running the programme catches the ones that matter to learners. Designing for post-launch uplift from the start made the courses better over their life, not just at launch.