Open edX LMS Customization for a Professional Training Center

To customize the Open edX platform, our LMS developers had to find workarounds for a few challenges associated with the platform’s underlying technologies and structure:

• As the SaaS components resided on multiple servers, it could take more resources to install and configure dependencies, thus optimization was needed.
• LMS customization was further complicated with the mix of Python, Django, and Ruby languages used across the platform’s functional modules.
• The customer stored their training materials as SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) files, and those were to be migrated to the new system; however, Open edX didn’t support this format out of the box. 

Addressing these challenges, Iflexion’s developers customized the system covering the following components tailored to the customer’s style guide and business specifics:

• Custom branding based on a theme developed from scratch using the customer’s logo and color scheme.
• A course management console allowing admins to create and edit courses via an intuitive user interface. The course creation dashboard covers the end-to-end process of configuring a course along with its contents, timeline and completion requirements. Each course is concluded with interactive quizzes of multiple-choice or open-ended questions, which assess trainees’ knowledge instantly as the LMS processes the results automatically.
• Customized data presentation to comply with the customer’s vision of learning delivery.
• User management features for admins to get visibility into subscribed companies and their enrolled trainees, control user permissions, manage user groups, and view users’ personal data in a protected environment.   
• Open edX E-Commerce configuration to connect the SaaS platform’s dedicated e-commerce module and enable the customer to manage their course catalog, orders, and billing without leaving the system. The connected module also expands the customer’s marketing opportunities as it supports special offers and coupons.

When customizing the LMS, we also configured the following user roles and their respective permissions:

• Admins: the customer’s managers overlooking course creation and full-cycle content management, user data management, and account management.
• Teachers: privileged users assigned on the customer’s side to supervise the training process for each subscribed company, monitor their students’ progress, and address end clients’ inquiries regarding the course materials.
• Students: end clients’ employees enrolled in the courses by their organizations, who get access to the purchased training programs.

Our Open edX developers also migrated data from the customer’s legacy Java platform to the new LMS. As the course materials were originally stored as SCORM files which were not supported by Open edX out of the box, our team used SCORM Cloud, a specialized third-party service, to wrap the customer’s training programs into SCORM dispatch packages. This allowed the customer’s admins to manage SCORM materials natively in the new LMS.

To host the new cloud-based system, we installed, configured and deployed it on Amazon EC2, a highly scalable cloud hosting service, which maintains performance regardless of the number of concurrent users. This hosting option allowed the customer to stay flexible about their consumed computing resources and keep expanding their client base with no friction.