Learning Management System
YMCA of the North offers online learning courses which so far have been accessed on an anonymous basis, meaning no registration nor identification from users was required to participate. Thinking about expansion, YMCA of the North teamed up with Five Jars and overhauled the LMS entirely by transforming it from a landing page-based solution to a fully functioning learning platform.
YMCA of the North has been continuously growing its learning content. However, the learning solution based on web landing pages soon became unsuitable to handle the amount of content and the number of requests efficiently. Therefore, they partnered with Five Jars to redesign their learning environment and build a learning management system that enables them to expand their user base by addressing users’ needs and desires more accurately. Within five months, our team has identified the requirements, proposed an approach, and delivered the solution. Read further to discover more about the project with YMCA of the North.
A learning environment unable to handle the success
The old learning environment was based on web landing pages. This meant that with increasing content, the system became inherently complex to update, add and cross-link content efficiently. Besides the administrative burden, the old solution was not user-centric and limited the future growth of the platform. The most crucial shortcoming of the old system, however, was that users could access all content anonymously. Therefore, it was very hard to tailor content to users’ needs and to identify growth opportunities.
Authentication as a challenge
After a thorough discovery phase, we have identified authentication to be one of the key pillars of the new system. Based on our initial requirement analysis, we have decided to build several layers of access restriction to provide the needed functionality.
More specifically, our team has built access restrictions both on user level as well as group level, eventually simplifying the user management in the backend.
While the user-based restriction layer was straightforward, the group-based layer turned out to be quite a challenge. The main cause for these challenges were the hierarchy of restrictions. Our team has solved the issue by customising the group restriction layer and locating it hierarchically above the personal one, ultimately overruling any personal restriction if granted access by the group layer.
3
authentication layers
We built three authentication layers, protecting the data of YMCA of the North
∞
number of groups
Students can join multiple groups, while groups can have any number of members
New functionalities speeding up the administration part of the learning environment
Another main request from YMCA of the North was the simplified user and course content management. More specifically, scheduling courses, re-scheduling them as well as adding and distributing content and information had to become much simpler and quicker.
Our team developed a scheduling and rescheduling solution which did these tasks with one simple click. Moreover, YMCA of the North can now invite new users as well as add users to new courses in batches. This reduced the manual workload of the employees significantly.
Eventually, our solution also simplified the communication between the administration, course leaders and users by providing a simplified communication channel which allows for a quick and easy release of messages and emails.
A new LMS structure to succeed
All these new functionalities are part of a LMS based on Drupal. As YMCA of the North had specific requests, an off-the-shelf solution wasn’t doing the trick, which is why we have adapted the open-source Drupal version to the specific requirements.
Using an open-source solution as a basis allowed us to keep the future running costs of the LMS low for our client and ensure the compatibility with the remaining IT environment of YMCA of the North.
An LMS which is scalable and cost efficient
YMCA of the North and Five Jars partnered to overhaul the learning environment. We integrated a wide range of new features and built a solution which fosters the implementation of new features in the future. We have delivered the solution and migrated all content in a tight timeline of 5 months only.
Are you wondering if a new LMS may be a great way for you to grow your user base? Get in touch with our experts for an initial call and we’ll demonstrate the potential for you.
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