NLC Learning Platform

The Problem

New Life Church's counseling program lost its free Canvas LMS and needed a replacement fast. The hard part: ~180GB of course video — roughly 6GB per lesson across 30 lessons — was stuck in Dropbox, and re-uploading it by hand would have taken days of manual uploading.

The Approach

• Scripted the migration end to end — pulled the course video out of a shared Dropbox folder, pushed it to Cloudflare Stream over its API, and wrote the resulting video IDs straight back into the database, instead of re-uploading 30 lessons by hand.
• Modeled the program the way it's actually taught: courses hold modules, modules hold lessons, and each lesson is assembled from blocks — video, text, resources, discussion, or reflection — so a lesson is a designed experience, not a video with notes stapled underneath.
• Built four real roles — admin, co-teacher, TA, and student — so the people running a cohort have permissions that match their job instead of sharing one login.
• Used passwordless magic-link sign-in with an access-request queue an admin approves, because the students are working adults in a counseling program, not a technical audience.
• Tracked per-lesson progress, discussion posts, and written reflections, so a cohort leader can see who is actually moving through the material and who has gone quiet.
• Kept building after launch — the roles, lesson blocks, and tracking above grew in over the following weeks, on top of a platform that was already carrying a live cohort.

The Outcome