Michigan Virtual

Objective: Help every Michigan student find the right online course

Michigan Virtual is a Lansing-based nonprofit that supports online and blended learning for Michigan schools. Section 21f of the State School Aid Act lets students in grades 6 through 12 take online courses as part of their school day, and Michigan Virtual maintains the statewide catalog of those courses: Michigan’s Online Course Catalog. Every district links to it, and students, parents, and counselors use it to find courses open to every Michigan student, or ones a district has made for its own students.

The catalog has a lot of data and a wide audience. Courses come from many providers, each with its own offerings, terms, prices, and review details, and the information changes every school year. The people searching include students, families, and school staff, so the site has to be easy for everyone to use, including people who rely on screen readers. In 2019 the catalog was kept current through spreadsheet imports, and the search experience needed a fresh start.

What Web Ascender Did

We rebuilt the public catalog first, then replaced the spreadsheets with a system the course providers use themselves:

• Accessibility first - before any design, we reviewed the existing catalog for usability and accessibility, tested it with VoiceOver, and built a clickable prototype that Michigan Virtual’s team could test and react to
• A new catalog front end - a WordPress site with search grouped by course, filters for subject, provider, school level, term, and district, course detail pages with offerings and reviews, and a “Request Access” form for new providers
• Accessibility checked at every step - we tested with assistive technology throughout the build and finished with a full accessibility report at launch
• A Rails admin application - a new admin system for course providers and Michigan Virtual staff, with user invitations, terms, course offerings, pricing, reviews, and performance data, launched in February 2021
• Bulk tools for busy providers - bulk creation and bulk updates of course offerings, course duplication for the next school year, and imports from third-party providers
• A public API - the WordPress catalog reads course data from the Rails app through an API and a custom search plugin, so updates in the admin appear on the public site
• Features as the catalog grew - course sharing and an “email your advisor” option, CSV exports and reports, state course code (SCED) handling, a reworked search, and a multi-step course wizard for adding new courses
• Upgrades and support - Rails and security upgrades, new production servers in 2026, passwordless sign-in with magic links, and ongoing hosting

The Outcome

Michigan’s Online Course Catalog now runs on a system built for the way the data really works. Providers update their own course offerings in one place, in bulk when they need to, and the changes appear on the public catalog without a spreadsheet round-trip. Students and families get a search built and tested for accessibility from day one. Michigan Virtual buys improvements one project at a time, so the catalog keeps getting better every school year.