Building a digital learning environment

As part of our offering, we specialise in solving unique technological challenges and are often asked to build bespoke platforms for clients with very specific needs. An area which has come up several times recently is creating a learning environment, so we thought it would be useful to dedicate this month’s blog to two case studies of recent digital learning environments that we’ve developed and to share some insights which may be useful to anyone who is grappling with a similar challenge.

A digital learning environment is an online learning space that is designed to enable learning by leveraging technology. The expectations of students are changing. They’re accustomed to accessing information digitally and immediately. For organisations providing learning, there is the opportunity to meet their needs and preferences by using the web and the latest technologies to provide students with a way to access learning resources, manage their information and enhance their learning.

The biggest challenge with a digital learning environment is ensuring that it designed to be user-centric. This means that it prioritises users’  requirements and responds to the way that they want the system to work so that it supports what they’re trying to achieve. Too often, digital environments are technology-centric, meaning that they are designed around the technology. The key to success is bringing together the users’ needs and the technology possibilities. This is an iterative process of understanding the users’ perspective, showing them with what can be done, getting their feedback and adjusting the design. At the end of the day, a digital learning environment is only successful if it is actually used!

Background to the challenge

Evidence points to a drop off in academic achievement among more disadvantaged students as they progress through their education. Our client is part of the education sector and it is their ambition to help to raise attainment in schools. Our client wants to intervene early and collaborate with, co-create with, and support the teaching community. Educators are very busy, so it needs to be as easy as possible to access resources, knowledge and research which can provide the enrichment environment that is needed to help students reach their full potential.

The brief

To connect teachers with research and evidence on the most effective way to support learners from a wide range of backgrounds to become and remain high attainers. The ambition was to achieve this through an online web-based platform that offers research-based training courses and in-classroom challenges that teachers can run with their students to develop their academic confidence, curiosity and creativity.

Who is the audience?

Teachers, Senior School Leadership, Educators

The approach

We started by conducting interviews with a wide range of educators investigating how an online web-based platform might be used in schools and how to ensure that it would be a resource that provided real value to teachers. Taking a product development and evolution approach, we produced a feature set and roadmap, incorporating the insights from the consultations. This informed the product development plan for phase one.

What were the technical challenges?

The biggest challenge was to design a technical architecture that would support the delivery of both training and in-classroom challenges. It needed to support  a platform rich in content, research and tools which effectively support teachers in delivering a wide range of enriching and engaging academic activities, whilst also being easy to use for editors.

Using the platform, teachers should be able to tailor the content to the needs of their students, picking out and adapting individual short sessions or building a cumulative and integrated programme which spans a whole topic or series of related subjects.

Background to the challenge

Our client provides a rich summer programme of cross-disciplinary courses. They wanted to digitise the flow of material and information to get rid of a high volume of emails sending out course information and receiving coursework. The size of the participant pool and the bespoke nature of the programme created a high degree of administrative complexity.

The brief

To provide an online platform for students to apply and pay for courses, access course material, submit coursework and receive grades.

The programme consists of multiple courses managed and taught by range of academics. Our client needed to be able to allocate students without overloading the course and manage big group teaching and small group teaching. They need to be able to publish teaching materials to specific subsets of students and inform students that the material was available, whilst ensuring that students can only see material relevant to them. They also needed to allow lecturers to manage course material without needing administrator support, allow students to submit coursework and then release grades back to students.

Who is the audience?

Students, Lecturers. Administrators

The approach

We took a process-driven approach, analysing their current processes and looking at how each aspect of the process could be digitised. This enabled us to design a digital process, validating each step with the management team. We then produced a prototype so that they could experience how students and lecturers would interact with the platform. Using an agile approach, we built and tested the application.

What were the technical challenges?

The first challenge was designing a flexible data structure so that multiple programmes could be run concurrently in different formats. The second was providing an intuitive user experience for both students and lecturers that would require minimal training. The third was building an access control mechanism that allowed each person to see only what was relevant to them. There were multiple levels of access and each student, lecturer and administrator needed the right access to the right material, something that is really complicated in a programme like this. The final challenge was integrating to payment providers and to two factor authentication for tight security.

We are Olamalu, Drupal experts and experienced web developers. We’re a friendly and down-to-earth team based in West Oxfordshire, who work together to achieve brilliant outcomes. We’ve been developing websites and designing tailor-made tech solutions for a huge range of different challenges for over 10 years.

We work with many of our clients as an ongoing technical partner, but we also offer a consultancy service to solve a specific strategic challenge.