The Case: Development of a Corporate LMS

Everyone has already heard about e-learning projects. Studying online is quite flexible. For instance, workshops, extension courses, and trainings can all be done online. Besides, it has two advantages. The first advantage is the price - e-learning is less expensive than a traditional one. The second advantage is tight deadlines - the acquisition of knowledge can easily be checked through testing. To make online education corporate, we've decided to develop a corporate knowledge base - the automated staff learning management system.

What is Learning Management System?

In our case, the LMS is the special tool used to manage staff career education. By using it, an administrator can easily upload training programs, create and edit profile groups, and share tasks. Such a structured career program makes the system a one-box solution for many domains.

Goal

The goal was to develop a SaaS solution; that is, to simplify the work of the staff development department by organizing its career education. An employer can study material and conduct testing wherever he wants - everything he needs can be accessed on the Internet . After that he is ready for the revision of salary or job position, because the executives have gotten the results of the tests conducted.

Challenge

1. To avoid the necessity of having a linkman between staff and LMS, and save the administrator role to control data collection.
2. To design LMS using Artjoker Method and its development technologies.
3. To put into practice the Management 3.0 model developed by Jurgen Appelo and apply for a modern approach of managing Agile projects by doing this.

Solutions offered by the LMS:

1. Creating of training courses and programs: the LMS takes into account an employer's KPI for planning his/her career path.
2. Tracking the progress of e-learning: examining, scoring, and certification can be included in the plan.
3. Providing analytics:a complex scorecard makes it possible to rate the efficiency of e-studying.
4. Following the standards:the SaaS solution is flexible in accordance with the workflow requirements.

The back-end solution has been already launched for production - it is a dashboard for filling the content (images, text, videos or pdf files), which is a must for staff education. The administrator can also edit materials, register and group new users, and upload tests for exams. We are working on the front-end part of the product now, which will allow for review of the materials and pass exams.

Technologies used for the development:

Backend: Laravel 5.4

Frontend: HTML5, CSS3, Vue 2.1.10

The stages of development:

Business Analysis:

• Analyzing technical requirements
• Approval for the product specification
• Planning the stages of the product building

Development

• Creating the corporate LMS platform to train staff of the customer's company
• Developing custom modules for uploading the content, adding new users and groups of them, creating tests and deadlines.

Quality Assurance

• End-to-end functionality testing
• Usability testing
• Unit testing

Project Management according to 3.0 Model

• Using the Agile Methodology to manage projects (Scrum)
• Holding of Scrum meetings (Daily, Sprint Planning, Demo Retrospective)
• Organizing the workflow in a process-oriented manner to motivate the team, bring them together, and kick off the development process.