In the world of education, it’s critical that content can be managed on-demand without requiring intervention from a software engineer. As a standard practice, most of our products are built on top of an open source content management system (CMS) such as CraftCMS, Drupal or Wordpress. These platforms empower clients to keep their offerings relevant and their audiences engaged.
If learning products are destined for widespread distribution to schools, universities and professional development contexts, we will typically augment them with SCORM protocols. This code layer ensures that learning activities can integrate with whatever learning management system (LMS) is implemented by the distributing institution. Moodle, Blackboard and Canvas are a few popular LMS platforms on the market today.
This project holds a special place in my heart, so it gets top billing here even though it’s a comparatively small application. The very first app that I ever engineered was a Jeopardy clone for my 9th and 10th grade Biology classes back in 2004. I used Macromedia Flash MX to create a game that I could load student teams & unit questions into, complete with music, funny SFX and tap lights that we’d use to buzz kids in. 15 years later, I got a do-over. We built this game for a charter public school on the outskirts Boston. While this was intended as a single use for Black History Gala in the spring, we went ahead and built this on top of CraftCMS 3, so it could be shared and used by multiple teachers, for as many games as they’d like to create. CraftCMS is my favorite of the CMS offerings because it’s lightweight, easily customizable and seems to hold up better to upgrading and security vulnerabilities than some other options on the market.
One of the challenges when integrating with learning management systems is navigating the underwhelming options for administrative reporting, especially with nuanced data. Here, we solve this problem by creating a lightweight SCORM package that loads both the learning activity and the reporting tool into an LMS via an iframe from a remote-server. This allows us to connect with the LMS to report basic usage (i.e., who has completed the activity, which objectives were met etc.,) but also to provide a dynamic user and administrator experience generated by the server components of the remote application. Essentially, this allows for the best of both worlds: reliable LMS integration and a rich user learning experience.