Developing Custom Learning Management System – Laravel

Whether it is a school or a Multinational Company, a Learning Management System Software ensures consistent learning for the members. The SaaS solutions make it easier for the trainers to upload related documents and media files on a centralized platform helping the students to learn from a variety of resources.

And has that helped the learners?

A recent survey by Capterra confirms that 92% of the learners find the offerings of their LMS platform satisfactory.

Image source: Capterra

Educational institutions have shifted their classrooms to digital platforms. Organizations are moving their training platforms to cloud-based SaaS applications. It is quite obvious that multiple factors come into play when an institution chooses a digital platform for managing their materials. 

As per the very same research by Capterra, Functionality plays the biggest role in making an LMS purchase decision.

With that in mind, the expert Laravel development team at The Brihaspati Infotech recently built a custom Learning Management System for the medical aspirants. The Laravel LMS provides a great interface to the admins for arranging the study materials, managing learners, and tracking their progress.

The software is particularly designed for the trainers to manage their training materials-documents, audio files, and tracking the performance of their learners. Let us learn more. 

How custom LMS enhances productivity?

In general, a Learning Management System has the following advantages:

Self-Paced Training

Unlike conventional education processes, learners aren’t limited to time. They can pick out their digital programs at any time of their choice. They can continue with the sessions as long as they require it. 

SaaS solution- Learn from anywhere

The LMS is often a SaaS solution. The learners can access it on their systems or mobile phones regardless of their current physical location. A 24×7 learning platform offers a continuous flow of knowledge.

Ready-made LMS solutions can meet these basic requirements. A custom LMS development using Laravel exceeds them by offering more niche-specific features. Like:

• User Roles
• Industry-specific menus and submenus
• Custom functions specific to the industry
• Additional rules 

In short, a custom Laravel Learning Management System development can let your infrastructure look more professional and inclined to your industry standards.

It was thus easy to recognize the expectations of our client with the bespoke solution we delivered.

Client requirements for a custom LMS

Our client is related to the pharmacy industry where medicine names play a key role. Every letter in the medicine’s name mattered as they represented the brand, the chemical composition, and the purpose of the medicine. 

Newcomers found it really difficult to remember even the names, let’s not talk about the ailments each medicine provided and its side effects. As a reminder, a student is expected to learn hundreds of medicines and their alternatives.

Well, that was just about one student. The arena of treatments is wide- from neurology to dentistry and several others. Getting into the details, the platform was supposed to provide details about thousands of medicine names with their ailments and the side-effects.

Thus, we had three major issues:

• Managing a large number of medicines and their details
• Providing medicine details specific to the user’s interest
• Repeated tests to quicken the learning process

We solved one part at a time.

Custom Learning Management System-Laravel being the solution

We scrutinized every need of the client and market expectations from the custom Learning Management System. We needed to narrow down study materials available to each student, for which we needed custom filters that are effective in every means-

• Managing categories
• Managing subcategories
• Managing the questions
• Keeping a track of all the wrong answers

The process deserved development at every stage- the database, the front end, and the APIs in between to pipeline the right set of functions.

Personalized questions and Training gaps

We chose Laravel for the full-stack development of custom LMS. Not only the framework offered ample space to create custom functions, but we also made the software store data from previous sessions to guide the learner. 

The learners can choose the kind of session they want to take:

• Medicine types(Generic/Brand/Both)
• The Domains(Mental Health/ENT/Cardiac) and their SUbclasses
• The after-effects of the medicine(Uses/Side effects/Drug movement)

The following picture explains these initial steps:

In the process, the custom LMS also confirms if the learners are interested in new learnings or revising the terms they had missed in the past. The software keeps a track of all the wrong answers by the learner and guides them accordingly.

The learner can opt for the missed materials from the options, as shown below:

The “Missed Medications” option forwards the users to concepts they had attempted wrongly in the past. The section allows users to learn in a more personalized environment.

Training the Learner

The learner goes through multiple learning sessions before the assessment. The custom Laravel Learning Management System offers a more cognitive approach for the users that helps to learn new terms quicker.

We have divided the learning phase into two halves

• Learn Mode
• Practice Mode

Even though the questions asked in both modes are relatively the same, the ways options are put make this software a game-changer.

For example in the following image, we have a medicine named Citalopram. The right answer to this question is “Mental_health”.

This is worth noticing that while in the Learn Mode, “Mental_health” is particularly highlighted, in the Practice mode, all the options share the same color. However, the order of these options remains the same.

This helps the user to recall at least the position of the right option, if not the exact answer. The idea is to encourage a stepwise learning process helping the users to learn terms easier and faster.

Assessment and a complete report generation

Post the two-step learning process, the user can go for a personal assessment, named Quiz. The user can take up the assessment. This time, the position of the options is randomized making it a bit more difficult for the user. However, with two practice sessions with the same set of questions, the user is ready to hit the right option.

The custom LMS in Laravel generates a complete report of the user once the exercise is completed. The users can find all the sessions from the Exercise Tracking section. The LMS provides details like the date of the session, time taken to complete the exercise, and the number of correct and incorrect attempts. The following picture speaks of the rest.

The software is designed for just two roles-

• The Learner(End-User)
• The Tutor(Admin)

While a learner’s accessibility is limited to find the study materials and learn them, the Tutor’s dashboard has a longer list of features:

Managing Study Materials

The custom LMS in Laravel offers an excellent interface for the admins to manage the study materials. They can add, remove, or edit any resource of their choice, all with so much ease.

The admin dashboard offers a separate section to manage the medicines. The admin can add the medicine names along with an audio file. The client wanted to provide a source for the standard pronunciation. The admins can easily add one from their system.

In the following Gif file we can find the entire process to manage the medicines:

The admin can be seen placing the medicines under various domains, classes, and the subsequent subclasses. They can manage it all with so much ease. The software uses these declarations later as questions. Being centrally designed, fetching the information, and managing the assessments is managed smoothly.

Furthering with the abilities of the custom LMS dashboard, the admin can manage the categories and the subcategories. They can introduce Domains, the classes under the domains, and their extended subclasses. Similarly, they can manage a variety of Indications and specific indications.

The following Gif tours us through this part where the manager can be seen managing the various tags used through the assessments:

Tracking every student

Our custom LMS Laravel is capable of tracking all the learners individually. The admin can keep a track of all the users, their learning progress on the platform, and their past reports right on their dashboard, as shown in the Gif file below:

The best part, not only does it generate a report for each of their sessions, but it also tracks the session time and the number of questions that were answered within 5 seconds. 

The custom LMS development using Laravel thus proves its worth as a complete application, trainers have always looked out for. The software is particularly designed to meet the need of the pharmacy-based client. However, the features and the exact workflow can be customized to client demands. You can hire Laravel developers from us for all the tailored needs.

Our experience with SaaS development

The Brihaspati Infotech has been praised for its services as a third party Web development agency on popular platforms like Clutch. In the past, we have built several applications and complete software solutions for effective team management. 

In one of our recent blogs, we have talked about Fintech SaaS development where the end users can manage their finances on a centralized platform. The Business Owner can offer the users the platform’s services on a subscription model allowing him to have a continuous flow of revenue on and off the regular office hours.

Custom Learning Management System: In a Nutshell

Designing a custom SaaS platform is a task that demands clarity in every field- from workflow to custom functions and user roles. If you too are facing difficulty in managing your team you can always Contact Us.

You can hire PHP developers for a custom software solution or a mere tailored extension that does your job.