Case Study: Equal Rights Center - Advocacy Through Digital

The client needed a robust software platform that would allow and facilitate the creation of interactive and structured training materials. They were facing a challenge that was limiting their ability to deliver efficient and timely training and certification to those who required it. Not only did it take far too much time to create, print, and distribute certificates, but users were also constantly losing the certificates and requesting new ones.

There were no instructor-led e-courses. Their focus was on one-way content delivery instead of user-generated material. Courses were asynchronous. The ERC does not have internal IT support, so the ease of administering the LMS by ERC staff was a high priority.

When going through available LMS, the organization was put off by the multitude of features and the immense complexity of these systems.

ERC needed to be able to approve and validate all users before enrollment. They were entering each user individually; however, they were interested in simplifying this process. Ideally, they wanted the proposed LMS to host multiple users at any time.

They also needed a collection and archive mechanism of student data for e-learning courses. Data the client wished to track for e-learning courses and webinars included:

• List of names and tally of who accesses a course or webinar (individual users and by company)
• Date courses were taken
• Who completes a course (individual users and by company)
• Number of attempts at courses (individual users and by company)
• Overall scores for quizzes (individual users and by company)
• Quiz question success rates by individual quiz question (individual users and by company)
• Certificate generated (individual users and by company)

The team at Smile designed the system after careful research and analysis according to the client’s specific requirements and preferences and consulted them when developing the LMS. Smile worked closely with the Equal Rights Center to develop a comprehensive learning management solution.

We built a self-serving online application for administering e-learning courses and webinars for the organization. The new tool allows users to sign in to a secure portal with a username and password, which provides access to all online courses.

Upon passing the exam, a printable certificate is automatically generated and stored for future access. Time and resources previously spent on creating, printing, and storing certificates were effectively eliminated.

The new application also allows the organization to track the average time it takes to answer each question, complete the entire exam, which questions are most often answered incorrectly, and more. This information can then be used to improve the quality of the exams in the future.