PFR's Knowledge Zone - LMS system with educational content at your fingertips

Story by DP Press Team

6 min read

Building a Learning Management System for The Polish Development Fund (PFR)

The Knowledge Zone (Strefa Wiedzy) is an online platform that offers a wide array of courses on different topics in project management, business digitalization, fostering creativity in organizations, sustainable development, and career transition strategies. The platform is dedicated to everyone, however, it is particularly valuable for aspiring entrepreneurs or business professionals seeking to acquire new skills.

CLIENT

Based in Warsaw, The Polish Development Fund is a state-owned financial group dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs, local governments, and individuals whose aim is the sustainable social and economic progress of the country. Their mission is to provide a comprehensive platform that offers development instruments and efficient tools, all geared towards increasing Poland's investment and economic potential.

CHALLENGE

One of the tools offered by PFR is an e-learning platform for both experienced business owners and those who are just starting out their entrepreneurial journey. The backbone of such platforms often relies on an LMS, a Learning Management System. What is an LMS? Simply put, it is a tool that allows you to create, implement, and maintain educational courses or training programs.

While PFR had a pre-existing system of this kind (thanks to which they were able to provide a platform for thousands of students) their experience was unsatisfactory. It failed to meet their needs and lacked growth-oriented features for their students. They wanted to level up their solution and offer a platform with more possibilities.

SOLUTION

To create the perfect learning environment for students and provide a convenient tool for content editors, Direktpoint chose to implement Opigno LMS and enhance it with additional features. It took us more than 1,000 hours to create new functionalities and bring the Knowledge Zone to life - an elaborate LMS that functions in the Drupal ecosystem.

Why did we choose Opigno LMS?

Opigno LMS is an open-source and Drupal-based learning management system that can be customized to fit the needs of any organization. It has been trusted by many renowned brands and has a wide range of tools that cater even to enterprises. A few features worth mentioning are the possibility of building courses tailored to individual users, a social network that allows students to share their learning experiences, and a multitude of interactive components to make the courses more engaging.

Project highlights

While developing the Knowledge Zone, we took into account every facet of the project - from marketing and design, through user experience, all the way to what is behind the curtain - aka system management.

Design language - One of our responsibilities when taking up this project was coming up with a design language that resonated with PFR's branding and would be suitable for an educational platform. After many discussions and exploring various alternatives, we came up with a fun and playful design that includes key graphic elements and patterns. Our team worked on creating the main page and landing pages that display the courses in the most appealing way while providing additional information on their offer.

Training content - In the "Available courses" section you can filter through all of the courses offered by PFR, adjusting your search criteria to select a course that interests you. Each course page has a very intuitive interface and the lessons include different types of learning materials such as written content, videos, and links to additional resources. The course segments are summarized with a quiz and you can view your progress as well as the upcoming lessons.
My account & My activity pages - The "My Account" page is a personalized page that allows students not only to keep track of their learning but also see all their accomplishments such as their completed courses, earned certificates, and gained skills. The “My activity” page, on the other hand, lets students interact with each other sharing their thoughts and acquired knowledge.
Workshops section - Thanks to the 'Available Workshops' page users can sign up for different on-site workshops. This means that the platform is not strictly related to e-learning but also offers other options.
Additional learning goodies (H5P integration) - This integration allows you to include plenty of fun learning goodies such as quizzes, crosswords, interactive videos, flashcards, drag and drop exercises just to name a few! In this particular case, due to the content's nature, there was no need to include these types of components. However, it's good to recognize the potential for such elements to be integrated into the courses.

Paragraph Library - Keeping in mind future content editors, we have prepared a separate page dedicated to presenting the available paragraphs that can be used to build pages within this website. This will definitely come in handy and reduce the learning curve.

END RESULT

By incorporating the Opigno LMS module, we have created an engaging e-learning platform packed with many useful features! The implemented modifications not only benefited the platform from the users' point of view but also allowed organizations within the PFR group to easily use and manage it. We incorporated our reliable paragraph-based system and provided training to ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of its functionality. Currently, we continue to offer ongoing support (which includes hosting, system maintenance, and continuous development).

This exciting project was a pleasure to work on and we eagerly anticipate similar opportunities in the future to leverage the knowledge we have gained. One thing we can say with certainty is that when it comes to the quest for the ideal LMS our solution is a safe bet and you're almost guaranteed to have satisfying results, no matter the size of your company!

OUR CHECKLIST

Implementation of an E-learning Platform Using Drupal Opigno LMS,
Key visuals and design language of the website,
Easily manageable content editing system + Paragraph Library,
Expansion of the LMS with additional sections,
Building a Workshop module,
Translation of Opigno into Polish while ensuring compliance with RODO (General Data Protection Regulation),
A complete training for PFR teams on how to use and manage the delivered system,
Ongoing support covering system maintenance, hosting, and development

Time of execution: 5 months
Client: The Polish Development Fund (PFR)
Website: https://strefawiedzypfr.pl/