We recently helped LinkLearn transform their student assessment process from emailed Word documents into a fully integrated Learning Management System. Students now complete assessments step-by-step with instant progress tracking, while LinkLearn benefits from automated workflows, seamless Zapier integrations, and simplified administration. This solution not only improved efficiency but also created a better learning experience for students.
Context:
- LinkLearn provides real-estate courses to students
The Issue:
- Previously students would complete assessment in a word document, manually send via email, and was assessed by LinkLearn.
Our Solution:
- We developed a Learning Management System for them to allow students to complete 1 assessment task at a time, providing the relevant reading materials and assessment documents sequentially as each item was completed and submitted. For LinkLearn, this meant better automated tracking of students progress, at a discrete level that would have otherwise been impractical or impossible to do manually. This provides benefit to students of being able to see their progress as it happens. This benefits LinkLearn by including reduced manual processes.
Our system was integrated on top of LinkLearn's existing automation using Zapier triggers, and we were able to plug our solution in seamlessly to that system without the need to overhaul everything.
Included in our solution were:- Automated weekly email summaries to LinkLearn to track all students at a high level
- Automated, configurable emails to staff and students on submissions and assessments
- Admin dashboard to customise course content, manage students and view an activity feed of submissions as they happen
- The platform we built is easily extendible to additional courses, sections, questions and override default content, and can be managed simply by LinkLearn, moulded to their specific workflow and requirements. A generalised off-the-shelf solution would fall short in this regard, and not provide the specific automation, triggers and simplicity of the UI that we were able to provide.
- The system can handle large video and file uploads and provide previews in-line so students and staff can review submission data on the portal.
- Before more recent legislation changes, we developed an automated marking system that provided a high-level syntax to perform a pre-assessment on student submissions that determined accuracy of the student answers with a high level of confidence.
- As students may be offline, we developed support for offline editing that allows students to view content and edit drafts of answers to be saved when back online. This was developed using protobuf to ensure future-proofing as more data was added or names changed.
- We synchronise also all student submissions to a corresponding Dropbox folder to integrate seamlessly into their existing workflow, while still providing the automation benefits.
The Tech:
For this project we used an Angular frontend for both admin & course portals, and a rust backend, as we needed something low-level and fast to process the natural-language input. We originally had a Node backend but needed but required a more optimised backend due to the nature of the assessments. The decision to move to rust was an initial upfront hurdle, but has paid dividends since due to its reliability and ability to refactor incredibly easily.
We use protobuf message format to ensure front-end and backend share the same data models.