E-Learning Platform

E-learning platform for a Life Skills programme that allows users to sign up, complete courses and quizzes, chat with teachers and sign up for in-person events held by the course.

About the project

Goals:
- Allow for the delivery of Life Skills content to users.

- Facilitate efficient communication between course facilitators and students.

- Enables staff to reach out to potential leads using email marketing.

Solutions:
- Creation of an E-Learning platform to host the educational content

- Develop a help-desk feature for the user to submit questions to the facilitators

- Create an email marketing feature that allows for mailing lists to be created and emails to be drafted and sent through the platform.

Results / Impact:

- Completely ready-to-use platform that is user friendly for not only the end user but also the administrative staff to maintain the back-end.

- A familiar user interface similar to that of popular online learning options to allow for the end user to navigate and learn without obstacles.

- An efficient marketing tool that allows for the grouping and sending of mass emails to recipients as well as the recording of email analytics for marketing decisions.

Features

Course Management

E-Learning platform that allows multiple course facilitators to edit and their course content and communicate with their participants

Chatting with teachers

Course participants has a dedicated portal that they can use to contact their course facilitators to have their queries answered.

Event Management

Course Administrators can create events that participants can register for while limiting the number of attendees in order to keep with health guidelines

Email Marketing

Marketing Managers can schedule email marketing campaigns and track vital statistics such as opened rate, number of clicks, etc.

Accounting and Invoicing

The administrator can view and access all sale data from the platform as well as automatically generate and email invoices to the course participants.

Coupons and Promotions

The administrator can generate and distribute coupons from the promotion system that can be used by new signups to get discounts

Challenges

The challenges faced during the development of this project are:

- Similarity to popular existing online learning platforms

- Necessity for the back-end to be easy to navigate

- Use of a multitude of different types of content within the courses on the system

- The messaging feature for internal staff needs to be a separate feature to that for the facilitators and end users

Similarity to popular existing online learning platforms

When E-learning is mentioned, there are a few popular platforms that immediately come to mind. One of the issues faced within this project is that the system needed to be just similar enough to those online platforms that it would be easy to digest and transition to while still being unique enough that it can have an identity of its own. Sundae Bytes overcame this issue by taking the main format of the existing platforms as inspiration for the client's system. While the format remained standard, the colour palette and use of brand-specific graphics allowed for the brand's personality to shine through in the project.

Necessity for the back-end to be easy to navigate

Intuitive and effortless. At Sundae Bytes, we believe that no matter how 'functional' a system is, if it does not cater to the user experience then it is not a well designed system. In this project, it was necessary to enable a wide array of functionality such as Email Marketing, Course Content Administration, Event Management, Product Promotions, Coupon Discounts, Accounting and Invoice generation and others. One of the challenges we faced was the design and layout of the system that makes accessing all these functionalities intuitive and effortless to our client. We overcame this issue by having multiple meetings with our in-house UI/UX department. The Head of User Interface and User Experience was able to recommend various layouts which were then implemented by the software development department.

Use of a multitude of different types of content within the courses on the system

In order to keep the various courses offered on the platform interactive and user friendly, the system needed to facilitate showing content to the the course participants in a variety of different formats such as Infographics, External Web Pages, Microsoft Power Point Presentation slides, PDF documents, Videos and Quizzes. Sundae Bytes overcame this issue by implementing a customization to the platform that allowed course content administrators the ability to upload their content in their preferred formats as well as presented these various contents to the course participants in a user-friendly format. (needs rewording @sinead)

The messaging feature for internal staff needs to be a separate feature to that for the facilitators and end users

Another requirement of the project was to enable a messaging feature for the internal staff. In our requirements gathering, we discovered that there are situations that can arise where it is necessary for course facilitators to be able to message the administrator and each other in order to organize events. It was also necessary to have a platform for communication that is professional and isolated from other messaging platforms that they use for their personal lives. It was recommended by our UI/UX team that this feature should be separate from the one that course facilitators use in order to message their participants in order to minimize the chance of sending a message to a recipient that it was not intended to go to. We overcame this issue by following the recommendations and designs made by our UI/UX team.

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