Global Knowledge Supports Its Unique Scheduling Needs & Simplifies Professional Learning

Global Knowledge is one of the world’s largest IT training and professional development companies, drawing more than 50,000 students to its virtual classrooms every year. The organization enables IT professionals in every stage of their career to build new skills and pursue certifications that are critical to their success.

As how we learn evolves, Global Knowledge’s live online classrooms are leading the industry in providing professionals, who want to learn from subject matter experts in real time but can’t get out of the office, the flexibility and convenience of a remote, live, and online classroom environment.

Global Knowledge was looking for a new platform to better support those virtual classrooms because its incumbent product was very one-way, according to its CXO, Kevin Pawsey. “The instructor was mostly broadcasting to students rather than delivering an interactive educational experience,” he said.

 Global Knowledge’s criteria for choosing a new platform focused on ease of use, a frictionless customer and staff experience, and how it integrated with other solutions on the back end. The organization also sought a true partner that cared deeply about Global Knowledge’s mission and would continually improve and innovate to support that mission.

Unique organization, unique needs

One of the things that makes Global Knowledge unique is its ability to flexibly provide quality online learning experiences, but it’s also unique in how it delivers those experiences. This is especially true when it comes to scheduling and accessing web-based meetings. Here are some examples:

• Class creation, then instructor assignment: Global Knowledge’s course offerings and hosts are not a one-to-one match. Because class scheduling happens before an instructor is assigned, it isn’t always clear which instructor will host the course when it is scheduled.
• Recurring classes with irregular schedules: Due to the duration of some of Global Knowledge’s courses, weekly repeating events often don’t follow a pattern because of holidays and other scheduling conflicts.
• Student access and saved recordings: To keep the student’s experience seamless, each student must be able to access the live virtual classrooms and previous class recordings through the Global Knowledge Student Portal, MyGK.

Global Knowledge’s next video communications solution had to fit the unique design of its online learning services, not the other way around.

“With most tools, you schedule web meetings by calendar or email client and have to take on the role of both host and scheduler,” Pawsey said. “We need more flexibility than that because we don’t have a one-to-one match between instructors and courses.”

Pawsey and the Global Knowledge team found that flexibility in Zoom’s video communications platform. 

The Zoom API & integration

The Zoom API helped Global Knowledge build an integrated meeting scheduling process, one that’s unique to Global Knowledge. Zoom’s API provided the flexibility Global Knowledge needed to manage scheduling irregularities with recurring meetings, facilitate instructor hosting switches for scheduled courses, and ensure Global Knowledge’s students could retrieve Zoom Meeting recordings at a later date.

 “You can integrate Zoom pretty much with anything without loads of additional engineering,” Pawsey said. “We do lots of Microsoft training, and most of our corporate IT is Microsoft. We can seamlessly plug Zoom into our corporate IT system. We actually saw our net promoter score increase during the Zoom implementation as well.” 

Continuous innovation, partnership

In choosing Zoom, Global Knowledge gained a flexible video communications platform to complement its educational technology and reliably support its web-based courses, but it also gained a technology partner that could grow with its needs. Pawsey says that Zoom’s product teams have already delivered on several Global Knowledge feature requests and are working on more.

“After the initial Zoom launch, students and instructors shared ideas on how to make the experience better,” Pawsey said. “Zoom has delivered on a few of these requests, including audible in-meeting chat notifications, pre-assigned breakout rooms, and the ability to search live meetings by topic from the Zoom Dashboard. It really demonstrates just how much Zoom cares about our success.

“The long-term view that Zoom’s got means we’re not going to be flipping onto another system in a short amount of time. There’s a huge potential for Zoom in education.”