A global professional accounting institute · Accredited CPE course & launch ecosystem
An accredited ethics course, built from scratch and a full launch ecosystem.
A NASBA-accredited self-study CPE course on the ethics of emerging technology, delivered with a launch article, animation, and full WCAG 2.1 AA compliance. The institute's first fully authored course.
CPE credits delivered, against 1–1.5 scoped
accessibility issues found and fixed
planned activities across the build
word companion article for the member magazine
The institute wanted a self-study CPE course on the ethical challenges of AI, big data, and IoT, grounded in its own statement of ethical professional practice, accredited under NASBA's QAS self-study standards, and fully WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. It had never commissioned newly authored instructional content before. Every prior course had been adapted from existing internal training.
That first made the review process the real constraint. On accredited compliance content, nothing ships until the subject-matter experts validate it, and the institute's review machinery wasn't built for the depth that authored content demands. Review cycles ran roughly 45 working days against a delivery cadence of about 25 - a risk we flagged in writing before the contract was signed, and one that played out almost exactly as forecast.
A complete accredited course pipeline: detailed design document, full storyboard and script, then Alpha, Beta, and Gold builds in Articulate Storyline with final source files and xAPI export. Supporting the accreditation case: CPE calculations, a NASBA checklist, a glossary, and IP and plagiarism check reports.
Accessibility ran as a workflow, not a checkbox. A formal audit late in the build surfaced 52 issues (missing captions, audio descriptions, iframe titles) and every one was remediated before sign-off, documented transparently for a compliance-sensitive professional audience.
Around the course, a launch ecosystem: a 2,500–3,000-word article for the institute's member magazine, a 45–60-second launch animation with two caption versions, and an updated CPE calculator. The course teaches; the ecosystem gives the marketing and member-engagement teams something to launch with.
“On accredited content, the reviewer's calendar is the schedule.”
The course shipped at roughly 2.0 calculated CPE credits (above the 1 to 1.5 scoped) meeting the NASBA bar and full WCAG 2.1 AA, with all 52 audit issues closed. The article, animation, and calculator shipped alongside it.
By close, the conversation had changed. The institute's leadership moved from reviewing a pilot to asking how AI could shape future projects and requesting a scoping roadmap. The launch ecosystem was what repositioned the work from production to advisory.
What made it hard
The review cadence. Forty-five working days per client review cycle against a 25-day delivery cadence meant the schedule was governed by the reviewer's calendar, not the production plan, and on accredited content there is no shipping around a late SME. Early SME review latency cascaded through every downstream milestone, and holiday schedules pushed final sign-off roughly three months past the original close. The team absorbed roughly double the planned iteration on a fixed scope while the client's approval process caught up with what authored content demands.