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By Skvare on
The National Athletic Trainers' Association (NATA) is a professional membership association for certified athletic trainers and others related to the athletic training profession. Their mission is to represent, engage, and foster the continued growth and development of the athletic training profession. NATA provides a robust variety of educational resources to help athletic trainers stay up to date with the latest clinical teachings and techniques.
NATA's Professional Development Center (PDC) offers e-learning courses that allow members to learn and earn Continuing Education Units (CEUs) through online quizzes, courses, and webinars. Skvare developed a collection of about 20 modules, called the Learning Management Suite, to run the system. This module suite not only provides the ability to create course content for the LMS, but also provides the ability for users to purchase courses with credits, generate LMS pass records, and restrict access to other sections of the courses.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Skvare opted to use Drupal 7 for the project to leverage some existing functionality from contributed modules, its access control features, and integration with CiviCRM for membership management. Skvare developed a collection of about 20 modules, called the Learning Management Suite, to run the system. This module suite not only provides the ability to create course content for the LMS, but also provides the ability for users to purchase courses with credits, generate LMS pass records, and restrict access to other sections of the courses.
Our senior developer, Mark Hanna, used and extended the Drupal TinCan API module and developed the Tin Can Learning Record Store Drupal module integrating directly with the Learning Management System. This allows all of the user learning interaction data to be stored in Drupal as Drupal Entities. With full Views integration, it allows us to create just about any type of report that we can dream up. The LMS also has local access to all learning interactions to effectively and flexibly handle complex course passing rules. This is the first completely Drupal-native Tin Can API integration, that allows you to store and manage your data without using a third-party vendor such as Learning Locker.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
NATA wanted more options than their previous learning management system allowed. Administrators wanted to give course creators the flexibility to build courses with a variety resources - pages created within their CMS, external links, files, videos, interactive slideshows, and quizzes. They also wanted to unify their membership system with both the CMS and LMS so it could stored and managed all within one place.
Our Drupal-based Learning Management Suite is a full-featured, Tin Can (eXperience API) compliant LMS. It will work with packages created with Tin Can API compliant learning packages, such as the ones produced within Articulate Studio or Articulate Storyline. Review a full list of LMS features in the Learning section of our site.
NATA also wanted to ensure that they still had access to their old data. There were approximately seven years of course data from that system that needed to be imported into the new system. The data included Importing old quizzes, content and videos into the new system. The challenge was that the legacy data had a different database structure than the one used by Drupal. This required additional planning, development and testing to ensure everything stays intact.
The new NATA PDC website has helped the organization take full control of their system. Course creators can leverage existing content, content created within Articulate Storyline, HTML5 videos, and virtually any piece of content on the internet to create several types of courses and course structures. A fully integrated Content Management System, Learning Management System, Learning Record Store, and Membership Management System has allowed NATA to cut costs by getting rid of 3rd party services and take full ownership of all their data. Overall, NATA is proud of their new product. See the video they have put together to highlight some additional features for their users.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Tin Can API
We developed several additional modules that leveraged Tin Can API integration with the Learning Management System. Our custom module suite adds a Course entity to Drupal and page views, link clicks, video views, and file downloads are tracked and documented via the Tin Can API.
Tin Can Learning Record Store
We developed a Drupal native Tin Can LRS that allows tracking of a user’s progress directly in the Drupal Database. It is fully integrated with Views out of the box which can be used to build custom reports.
Quiz
We developed the Tin Can API Quiz 5 module which is a utility module that adds support for Quiz 5.x to the Tin Can API module. It allows communication of Quiz 5.x user interactions and results to passed to the learning record store.
Webform
We developed the Tin Can API Webform module which adds support for Webform to the Tin Can API module, allowing communication of Webform submissions to be integrated with the Learning Record Store.
Commerce
We developed a Tin Can Course Product and a Tin Can Course Product Bundle module that integrates with a Commerce product type. This allows courses to be purchased individually or as a bundle of multiple courses through the standard Drupal Commerce workflows.
CiviCRM
CiviCRM is integrated with the Drupal LMS for customer relationship management. CiviCRM keeps track of the user’s contact information, the user’s CEU credits, and emails sent to the users.
For more information on the functionality of the custom modules we developed for this project, visit our Skvare LMS Suite Modules page.
Community contributions:
Our Tin Can Learning Record Store has been made available to the community. The Tincan LRS has been tested with the Tin Can API module, Articulate Studio Tin Can packages, and using HTTP Request clients such as Poster. The Tin Can LRS module infrastructure is based on an integration with the Drupal Services module.
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Education
