Globalscholar transforms global portal with educational app development

Case Studies

Motifworks transforms Globalscholar’s Global Educational Portal with educational app development service on Azure

GlobalScholar® is committed to developing intelligent data-driven software technology solutions that accelerate student growth and achievement with educational app development. Offering the respected and award-winning product brands of Scantron®, Pinnacle™ and EXCEED®, GlobalScholar offers a range of analytics, learning management and assessment software solutions speciﬁcally designed to help administrators and teachers efﬁciently manage schools and improve student growth and achievement. Motifworks’ team was thrilled to work with GlobalScholar’s IT team because of the passion they had working on advanced technologies. We helped them build their software by offering them Application Modernization Services on Azure.

Business challenge GlobalScholar faced due to not focusing on educational app development

One of GlobalScholar’s legacy ﬂagship products, Encore, is an industry-leading software application that enables K-12 school districts to manage, track and analyze the data and timeline-based information processing ﬂow for students with special education needs and with Individualized Education Plans (IEP).
As GlobalScholar underwent a round of mergers in recent years, uniting three companies under one brand serving the K-12 education technology market, the company’s newly extended product suite struggled to maintain its usual stability and cohesion.
In the wake of GlobalScholar’s company consolidation, the Encore software package, deployed in 20 of the U.S.’s top 200 public-school districts, began to experience technical stabilization and quality issues. The GlobalScholar team, newly charged with managing a larger product suite, struggled to maintain and upgrade Encore’s code platform and its quality assurance.

This led some Encore customers to experience data processing errors and related technical issues that affected their ability to manage properly their business processes and workﬂow for their students. These product issues also began to affect Encore’s brand reputation, which later impacted GlobalScholar’s customer retention and revenue growth goals, that lead to them choosing educational app development.

The Challenge

“We needed remediation efforts to begin quickly with speciﬁc talents and skills needed early on to get one of our school district customers stabilized.”

The Solution

Motifworks was able to step in with very speciﬁc knowledge and skills to address these issues with our application,” says Nicole Francis, Director of Service & Support, GlobalScholar.

Beneﬁts of Partnering to Stabilize Product

To begin the urgent effort to address Encore’s technical issues for its customers, GlobalScholar sought out Motifworks for immediate help in launching a product stabilization and remediation effort.

1. “We needed remediation efforts to begin quickly with speciﬁc talents and skills needed early on to get one of our school district customers stabilized,” says Nicole Francis, Director of Service & Support, GlobalScholar. “Motifworks was able to step in with very speciﬁc knowledge and skills to address these issues with our application.”
Motifworks and the GlobalScholar Encore team collaborated real-time to create several new application releases that were vital for Encore’s stabilization and remediation. Through educational app development and collaborative effort ﬁrst addressed product-performance issues for speciﬁc customers, which then led to a fully stabilized product version applicable to its entire user base.
Once Encore’s product issues were resolved, GlobalScholar soon saw a signiﬁcant reduction of in customer submission of product support tickets. “At this point, working with Motifworks, the product was stabilized and our client school districts were already looking to improve their use of Encore and make changes that best ﬁt their districts’ needs,” says Nicole.
“We were then able to increase our billable professional services activities. We were very pleased to see the reduction in incident volume related to product performance while also having opportunities to work with our customers on new projects to optimize their use of Encore.”

2. In addition to working to stabilize Encore, Motifworks and GlobalScholar also collaborated to address issues with one of its newer software products, Exceed, which helps school districts manage and track student achievement and accountability programs, including Response-to-Intervention. “The Motifworks team had very speciﬁc expertise that enabled us to make improvements to Exceed’s reporting functionality,” says Nicole.

3. “Our collaboration on this project really helped us get needed reports completed and QA’d with all of the product’s speciﬁcations written out. Ultimately, we were able to meet a very aggressive completion deadline on this project.” “Working with the Motifworks team was a great experience,” says Nicole. “Motifworks has a plethora of different skill sets, as well as knowledge and years of experience. They were able to partner with our GlobalScholar team and really help drive our product remediation efforts.”

Accelerating Product Development Via Partnering

Motifworks acted as a liaison between GlobalScholar and one of its customers, taking great care of educational app development to support the GlobalScholar brand and focus on the highest level of customer support and service. . “With Motifworks great customer follow-up and communications abilities, I was able to package that and make Motifworks an extension of our GlobalScholar support and services team. This dynamic helped re-establish our credibility with one of our school district customers,” says Nicole. One of GlobalScholar’s school district customers, pleased with its on-going partnership with GlobalScholar, published a special commendation of GlobalScholar’s product stabilization efforts in their Superintendent’s monthly newsletter.
“I can quantify and qualify highly my personal observations working day to day with Motifworks and their follow-up and professionalism,” says Nicole. “This is also true from the customer perspective as well – from the voice of the customer.”