This case study is about using Open Source technologies for developing an enterprise Learning Content Management System. The reader of this case study is likely to be one of the following:

• Business, IT, or Project Manager
• Software Engineer, or Web Application Architect
• System Analyst, or Information Architect

Disclaimer

This case study focuses only on the publicly available portion of Premier Learning Unit web application, including the technical information which are considered Open Source therefore protected by the GNU Public license.

This case study does not discuss the detailed technical information exclusively developed for Premier, and does not include usable high resolution images of data models and UML diagrams. The employer and client proprietary information are not in any way discussed and disclosed in this Article.

The learning model described in this case study and used for Premier Learning Unit is an Open Standard provided to public by IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. ( www.imsglobal.org ).

Premier Learning Unit web application is build using Mambo CMS , and later on using Joomla! CMS which are both open source software protected by GNU Public License , meaning that it cannot be patented or licensed by any company.

Introduction

Premier Ltd. is a student success and education services company located in Langley BC. It is specialized in developing customized school agendas and character development programs to help K12 and Higher Ed students plan, organize and set goals for academic success. Premier serves thousands of schools throughout US and Canada.

Premier Learning Unit is a Learning Content Management System developed for online delivery of educational content developed by Premier to a large number of schools. Premier Go and Premier Get Set are two student character development programs that are currently using PLU 2.0.

Programs such as Premier Get Set and Premier Go contain a list of lessons, quizzes, surveys and videos that often get delivered to schools using packages of Printed Material and DVDs. However, schools with Computer Labs and Internet connections can also access the learning material online.

Using aggregated survey results collected from these schools, educators are interested in measuring the level of improvement in student behavior before, during and after they have gone through the programs. This can only be achieved using the PLU web application, otherwise traditional methods of gathering and analyzing survey results from a large number of schools would be an expensive and time consuming task. 

Project Objectives

Building individual websites for each of Premier’s Programs would have been very resource intensive and the final results would have been difficult to maintain. Instead, we needed to have one single custom made web application based on Premier’s business model, so we could use multiple installations of it for the online delivery of Premier’s curriculums and educational programs.

The ideal solution was a Learning Content Management System with the ability to store, manage and deliver the course content to all the schools who had a registered account with Premier.

Within such a system, School Administrators and Teachers were able to register and enroll their students to a set of virtual classrooms, where they could perform a number of learning activities such as:

1. Read and follow lessons’ instructions
2. Watch videos
3. Perform online Quizzes or Surveys
4. Get feedbacks from the system about their progress

In the mean time School Administrators and Teachers were able to create Grade Books and Survey Reports as soon as students submit their quiz or survey results.
For example they could compare the survey results before, during and after the students had gone through the learning activities and indicate whether or not there had been a progress in the student behavior and attitude.

Other Technical Features for this web application would be:

• Specialized Access Control List: ability to handle at least four types of users:
  • Administrators: with Global or school level privileges
  • Teachers: with classroom level privileges
  • Students: can only administer their own accounts
• User Profile Management: ability for users to register for a personal account using their name, email, username and password, and also the ability to administer their own accounts.
• Classroom Management: ability to add and remove students and teachers to virtual classrooms within a school account.
• Learning Management: ability to create, store and manage ordered lists of lessons for each types of users. Ability to construct lessons and assign a set of learning objects (Quizzes, Surveys, Videos, PDF documents, etc …) to every lesson.
• Reporting Features: ability to create Quiz Grade-books for each classroom, and Aggregated Survey Reports for each school or all the schools combined.
• Template Management: every program developed by Premier had a different branding identity, therefore a template management feature would have allowed different user interface look & feel for each individual program.

Information Architecture & Data Modeling

We started from creating the use cases and the right data model. A use case explains how users interact with an information system. A data model is an abstract way to describe the relationship between bits of data in a business model. It is the DNA of the business model, so possible mistakes will later on translate into wrong behaviors in the web application. That is not good at all, and often expensive to fix.

The best reference for our project was the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. ( www.imsglobal.org ). IMS is an open standard developed by many researches and organizations around the globe for developing Learning Standards, and Learning Management systems. Using their documentations we could find the general recipe of building a virtual learning environment. The original IMS documentations are far too comprehensive and what we needed for our project was in fact just a small portion of that.

Here is the Learning Management Environment in a nutshell which is actually borrowed from a theatrical point of view:

1. A Learning Unit consists of a set of Plays.
2. Each play has a set of Actors assigned to it.
3. A play consists of a sequential list of Acts
4. Every Act has a script, and a number of Props.
5. Actors use the script and props to perform an Act.
6. Once all the Acts are performed, the Play is over.

Now the application of that concept into a Learning Environment would be:

1. A Program consists of a set of Courses ( Plays ).
2. Each Course has a set of teacher(s) and student(s) assigned to it ( Actors ).
3. A Course consists of a sequential list of Lessons ( Acts ).
4. A Lesson has instructions ( Learning Activity, Support Activity, etc. ). Every Lesson can also include a number of Learning Objects ( Props ) such as Quizzes, Surveys, Videos, and PDF files.
5. Student(s) and Teacher(s) use the Learning Objects and instructions to finish a lesson.
6. Once they have finished all the lessons successfully, they graduate from the program.

So why use the confusing terms of ( Play, Act, etc. )? I thought, because they were the most abstract terms that IMS people could come up with. It was up to us to replace those terms and make them work for our project. The terms (Play, Act, etc.) could even be replaced with ( Training, Workshops, etc. ) depending to what project we were working on.

 
So that was the perfect blueprint for building a Learning Management System which could be used for all kinds of programs developed by Premier.

The next challenge was to select the right development platform for the PLU. Developing the whole application from scratch was pointless because it could become very expensive and time consuming. We needed a solid Open Source Content Management mainframe so PLU could be built on top of it. That would have saved us weeks worth of extra work, and financial resources.

Software Design and choosing the right platform

In 2005, the first version of PLU application was developed using Mambo CMS (  version 4.5.3 ) which is an Open Source Content Management System. Open Source meant that we were legally allowed to learn, modify and customize the source code for our project, and that was very important. In the first implementation of PLU, Mambo’s Access Control List (ACL) was completely modified, and also a lot of modification to the core code was done in order to bring Administration style user interfaces to the front-end of the application.

It worked just fine, until few months later that we needed to apply security patches, and we found it very difficult. Security patches were only suitable for a default installation of Mambo CMS, not a modified version. So for the version 2.0, PLU was developed as a separate component having the idea in mind to leave the mainframe core code intact and instead plan to extend the functionality of default CMS and turn it into a Learning Management System. This way we could apply security updates to our application without breaking it.

The Mambo Project was later on forked by their core development team and that was when Joomla! CMS was born. From the beginning it was apparent that Joomla’s community and core development were much more reliable than Mambo. Specially the Joomla! CMS 1.5 with a new more advanced API, Model View Controler ( MVC ) architecture, and a wonderful template management, was a very attractive option as a starting point for PLU 2.0; therefore: Joomla! CMS 1.5 became the platform of choice for us.

I would also like to mention that, for a while we did consider Moodle which was a well-known comprehensive Open Source eLearning application. The complete feature-set in Moodle was amazing, however at that time ( even today ), a Moodle installation could not be used to serve a large number of schools, and that was an essential feature that we could not do without.

In addition to that, Moodle in comparison to Joomla! or Mambo, lacked a good template manager. Moodle’s user interfaces also didn’t seem very exciting which was crucial for building a commercial software.

As a result of those observations, we decided it would be worthwhile if we could built a customized Learning Content Management System using Joomla or Mambo instead of attempting to customize Moodle for our purpose. 

Content & Data Entry Stage

For every new version of PLU we needed to repeat the data entry stage. We could not reuse the previous data mainly because PLU was still a young application so the data model changed and improved for every upgrade. We used two installations of PLU for Premier Go Program, and Premier Get Set Program.

Contents of these two programs were all available in Print and DVD formats, but contents could not be simply copy-pasted into the system. An educational booklet is a linear sequential list of static pages. Information within an online learning environment are none linear and dynamic. We needed content developers with good composition and computer skills who could hand pick pieces of useful information from the Print/DVD medium and then reconstruct them within the Learning Unit environment.

For the first implementation of PLU, Megan Artz, a brilliant content developer, was hired to do the data entry process for us. She became acquainted with the application’s administration interface in a relatively short period of time under my supervision. She also managed to create a set of help documentation  for the end users, and we exploited PLU’s environment to educate users on how to use the application. Megan was also one of the first people who helped us seek and destroy bugs in the newly developed application.

PLU 2.0 content entry was don by Kristen Vander Hoek , a smart political science university student with great patience, academic knowledge, and computer skills. Kristen would specifically pay good attention to the details and in the period of  two and half month that she worked with us, she learned the structure of PLU so well that she could take part in decisions makings regarding the content entry and information design issues. She was the best person after me who could answer questions about administrating PLU.

User Adaptation Challenges

Every web application has to pass the test of user adaptation; a learning Management System such as PLU is no exemption. Particularly the education market is dealing with even tougher issues. Today that I am writing this case study, there is a gap between education software and end-users:

On one side, the major challenge is usability and user interface ( UI ) design. Once we surpass Web Development and get to the filed of Web Application Architecture, UI design with today’s technologies such as Flash,  DHTML ( html, css, javascript ), and AJAX becomes a major time consuming task.

In the ideal world, we would like to have web applications capable of doing sophisticated tasks, yet keep them simple enough, so people who barely know how to turn on/off their computers manage to use it. In reality, there is a limit to simplifying a UI, because at some point the main purpose and functionality of the application is compromised.

The good news is that Internet technologies are rapidly improving as time passes, and future of web based user interfaces seems very bright.

On the other side, we are dealing with a demographic of school teachers who are very slow in adopting technology for education purpose. Many are still debating the purpose of using computers in classrooms. These group of users, still perceive computers as an overly complex expensive research tool. The irony is that students are the ones that view computer and internet not as “technology” per se, but as another ordinary part of their everyday lives such as TV, cell phones, taking a bus, or having hot cereal for breakfast. In fact some students may prefer interacting with their computers, than spending time in a traditional classroom environment.

The irony is, that in the educational software market we expect teachers and school administrators who are “Technology Immigrants”, use technology to educate students who are “Technology Citizens”.

The gab between having better web UI design technologies, and having a demographic of Technology Citizen educators, will hopefully seal in the next few years; given that, the next few years would be a great time for many companies to invest in online-learning research and development projects.

Future of PLU

After two implementations, PLU is even now considered to be a young application. There are still bugs being reported, and system could do a lot better with more diverse, and printer friendly reporting features.

The user interface has also room for improvement. To get a task done, users sometimes have to go though multiple screens and page refreshes . For instance, managing large number of users, their grades and progress reports currently lacks an intuitive flow. Use of AJAX ( Asynchronous Javascript and XML ) would be a great solution to bring the smooth feel of a desktop application to PLU.

Summing Up

Premier Learning Unit is a customized web application delivering Premier’s content to a large number of schools throughout US and Canada.

Administrators are able to study and review Student progress, using the survey results collected from all the online participants.

This online platform also has the flexibility to contain and deliver other future educational programs developed by premier.

Using Joomla’s template management, the Look & feel of the screens can be customized conforming to each educational program’s visual identity, without having to manipulate and modify the contents.

The Model View Control ( MVC ) Architecture used in PLU 2.0 facilitates future expansion and development of the web application. It also makes it a lot easier to trace and resolve reported software bugs.

In the content development and data entry stage, print and DVD content need to be reviewed and reconstructed to become suitable for an online learning environment. It would be even better if online content development happen separate from content development for Print and DVD, because of the non-linear nature of Information hierarchy.

User adaptation for education software is still slow. UI design for the web requires more time and effort compare to desktop applications and the technology is yet to become more improved as time goes on. On the other end teachers and school administrators are not as comfortable with using technology in the classrooms as they should be. Students on the other hand are very comfortable with using technology as an education tool. This industry gap between UI usability and user’s technology skills will eventually close once the next generation of school teachers with better computer skills take over.

Credits:

Premier Learning Unit web application was created as a team effort. I would like to thank the following people for all the help and support that they have provided for this project:

• Sarah Noble, former Marketing Strategist in charge of Premier Go Program
• John Koetsier, former Technology Solutions Department Manager
• Bernie Van Spronsen, current Technology Solutions Department Manager
• Wim Kanis, Product Development Manager
• Jaime Larson, Marketing
• Santiago Baca, Client Technical Support