Fort Hays State University
Building flexible, workforce-focused professional education workshops for mid-career leaders across in-person, blended, and asynchronous formats.
The Challenge
Fort Hays State University’s Professional and Continuing Education program offers flexible, career-focused learning for working professionals including online, noncredit, and CEU-bearing experiences designed to build skills that transfer to the workplace.
FHSU wanted to expand those offerings with two new workshops in financial management and data literacy, built for mid-career leaders. Content direction was clear from the start. The workshops needed to work across three formats: in person, fully asynchronous, and blended. They also needed to align with LightSpeed VT, the platform FHSU uses to deliver online professional learning, and they needed to be ready fast.
That combination of multimodal coherence, platform-specific structure, and a rapid development timeline is where strong learning design either proves its value or doesn’t. Before full development could move forward, SRM and FHSU also needed to align on what mid-career leaders needed from each experience and how the two workshops would fit together within the broader PCE program.
The Partnership
Six Red Marbles partnered with Fort Hays State University’s Professional and Continuing Education team to turn a program expansion goal into complete, modality-flexible workshop experiences.
The engagement built on a Product Development Workshop during which SRM provided recommendations for strengthening FHSU Professional and Continuing Education’s program framework. That prior work gave both teams a shared foundation as they moved into instructional development.
SRM worked closely with FHSU administrators, including leaders from Professional and Continuing Education and strategic partnerships. FHSU brought program context, audience insight, platform guidance, and review at key milestones. That included orienting SRM on LightSpeed VT course structure, a step that helped the team design online materials that fit the platform from the start.
The Strategy
SRM’s strategy centered on designing once for flexible deployment. The team created a shared instructional foundation for each workshop, then translated that foundation into materials for live facilitation, blended delivery, and fully asynchronous learning.
Key decisions shaped the work:
What SRM Designed & Developed
The full engagement covered both in-person and online production tracks. SRM developed two four-hour workshops, each organized into one-hour segments, then adapted the learning flow for blended and asynchronous delivery in LightSpeed VT.
Key deliverables included:
Together, these materials gave FHSU a complete set of resources for facilitators, learners, reviewers, and online course builders.
The Learning Experience
Learners work through clear, segmented workshops built around professional skill development and practical application. In the in-person format, facilitators guide participants through one-hour segments supported by presentation materials, learner toolkits, activities, and discussion prompts. In the blended and asynchronous formats, the same instructional arc becomes an online experience organized into platform-ready chapters.
The online versions were designed to keep learners active and were built around interactive video opportunities, written reflections, discussions, quizzes, and applied activities that support individual learning and workplace transfer.
The LightSpeed VT blueprint phase played a central role in the final product. By mapping the online structure before full production, SRM gave FHSU a clear view of how the workshops would function in the platform and a shared reference point for review. The resulting LightSpeed materials were approved with no revisions, a strong indicator that the planning process aligned instructional design, platform requirements, and client expectations before development began.
The Impact
FHSU Professional and Continuing Education gained two new workforce-focused workshop offerings that can be delivered in person, asynchronously, or through a blended model, giving the program a flexible foundation for reaching professional learners across different schedules, settings, and organizational needs.
The engagement also produced a replicable workflow for multi-format professional education. Early alignment on audience, platform requirements, and online course structure helped SRM move quickly while reducing downstream revision. The LightSpeed materials passed review without revision. This served as proof that blueprinting before production holds real value, especially when timelines are tight.
Why It Matters
Professional and continuing education teams are under pressure to expand offerings, serve working adults, and make programs easier to deliver across formats. Building separate versions of every workshop strains internal capacity and slows program growth.
This project demonstrates the business value of designing for multiple delivery formats from the start. By creating one strong instructional foundation and adapting it across in-person, blended, and asynchronous formats, FHSU Professional and Continuing Education gained a more scalable way to deliver workforce-aligned learning: two new workshops and a model for building professional education experiences that can flex with learner needs, facilitator capacity, and platform requirements.
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