A high quality learning in experience in Moodle for London School of Economics
Posted byMichael Frantzis and Jessica Cheung
Michael Frantzis
Principal
Michael leads the digital team in Europe. He has a background in R&D in computer science at Goldsmiths University, management of distance learning programmes and commercial agencies specialising in the higher education, not-for-profit and membership sectors. He now leads cross-Curio's teams across digital transformation, strategy, analytics, user research, web application development and digital learning tools.
The London School of Economics came to us with the problem that the students on their international programmes were not using the virtual learning environment (VLE) as much as they would have liked. Much of the time the learners would be on the portals provided by local teaching institutions who taught the courses. Feedback was suggesting that they were not seeing functionality which gave them an incentive to login. We were asked to design and build a new theme and template, and provide custom functionality to improve the learner experience as well as improve the look and feel.
For our approach we deployed our tried and tested approach to developing templates in LMS environments. This consisted of an opening workshop with the relevant academics and stakeholders before moving through a process of iterative design. An initial set of lo-fi wireframes were created and provided to LSE to give feedback. These were then uprated to high quality colour wireframes. These deliverables enabled the team at LSE to have a complete idea of how the environment would look like and function before moving to the build phase. Some of the custom functionality required working with new database feeds provided into the Moodle database. These included a new progress bar which pulled on information regarding the number of credits completed by a particular student and an assessment reminder component drawing on student records.
In order to build the theme and templates our internal developers were able to build a custom set of Moodle plugins with which the home page and individual course pages could be built. This allowed for a high degree of flexibility in how pages were created and edited.
The results? A resounding success. The new theme and templates were not only delivered on time but also well within budget. They are being actively embraced by the students, redefining the way they interact with the VLE.
“Curio’s approach was collaborative and flexible, always giving us the time and space to elaborate on our needs as the customer. Their way of working helps us to achieve out ambitious goals for the project.”
Olly Trumble. Head of LSE University of London Programmes