Looking to build a learning management software (LMS) to help your potential customers or internal team?
← Back to all
Developing an LMS Softwarefor a Not-For-Profit
Creation of an LMS platform to allow for therapists to achieve accreditation for working with individuals with disabilities.
Duchenne is a devastating muscular disease that affects over 15,000 children in the US and over 300,000 worldwide. CureDuchenne is the global leader in research, patient care, and innovation for improving and extending the lives of those children living with Duchenne.
As a not-for-profit headquartered in Southern California, their reach is global and continues to grow as they not only enhance the community through their cause but also the information they are able to provide through technology.
THE OPPORTUNITY
The CEO and COO from CureDuchenne went to LLT with a problem – as a not-for-profit organization, they only had a finite number of people within their organization. This presented multiple issues, but most importantly it created capacity constraints in providing certification and training to physical therapists that worked with patients with Duchenne. They traditionally provided certification with in-person workshops, but due to their limited resources and inability to serve more isolated areas that were unreachable by their representatives, many potential therapists were left without a method to gain certification. Their inability to solve this problem eventually led them to connect with LLT.
Client Type
Mid Market
Headquarters
Newport Beach, CA
Solutions
Strategy, Experience, Development
Services
Workshop, User Experience, User Interface, Web Design, Visual Media, Content, Software
“This project will be a fully integrated and interactive website for online continuing education for physical therapists. We would like to offer multiple modes of presentation which will include some written content, some audio, short videos, graphics and graphics to help explain content. There will need to be login/passwords for participants to come back to the content where they left off.
The content already exists in an in-person lecture format and we are looking at options to convert the in-person content to online education. It is currently a 6.5-hour course with 100+ powerpoint slides. The site will be branded with our organizations logo/branding, which already exists.”
The opportunity for LLT was to find a creative strategy that could leverage digital staff augmentation to solve the preexisting problem of scaling the organization. Building a platform that efficiently and effectively provides learning, resources, and support would allow their current representatives to multiply their reach and compound their efforts.
THE APPROACH
In order to design and build a platform that facilitated augmentation required LLT to take a twofold approach. The first involved working with the CureDuchenne team to digitize the hardcopy lesson plans and curriculum. By fully understanding the curriculum and intended outputs from an educational level allowed LLT to transform the lesson plans into comprehensive online courses.
LLT gave special considerations to how to achieve engagement with the target audience (i.e. physical therapists not feeling overwhelmed by the entirety of the course) and directed their focus on how best to add gamification and other UX strategies such as the length of the lesson, medium diversification being consumed, and resource access into the mix. The approach from a user engagement side was simple – understand the audiences enough to help derive a UX/UI experience that would keep people motivated and engaged enough to finish the lesson.
The second approach involved rapidly creating a prototype to see how far the boundaries could be pushed to fit into their budget. This involved an MVP, development-first approach in which over the first couple weeks LLT built a functional prototype that had all major features/functions integrated.
Design lead by development
The risk LLT took on as an agency by starting with a loose development cycle first paid huge dividends for the client as they were able to take on and produce much more than was originally thought. It was the first project to which LLT built a full version of the final deliverable before actually signing off on anything in terms of design. This led to an intricate understanding of the problem and what new features and ideas could help best solve customer-centric issues with a high ROI.
The approach from the development side was also simple– let development drive the design. Rather than focusing on all the design aspects first, LLT had the design team work directly with their developers to create a feature-driven UX/UI approach.
THE RESULTS
Since LLT did not have adequate time to fully understand the impact of the platform on therapists, certification, and the CureDuchenne team, they decided to direct their focus entirely on the technology. The outputs were a scalable LMS that allowed CureDuchenne to go from only serving a couple dozen people in specific locations at one time to serving hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously across the nation.
Consumers of the course were provided an enterprise-level education that they could consume at their own pace, peppered with connection points along the way to really feel like someone from the CureDuchenne team was always available to provide help. It also added a complementing factor to CureDuchenne’s continual in-person efforts, building a stronger community of those serving individuals with Duchenne.
The CureDuchenne team was now able to individually manage their wide range of content and attach resources to it. They also now had the ability to have quizzes, final exams, and certifications built-in, not just for the current courses but for all future courses that they wanted to add. From a backend perspective, they now had a platform and CMS in one that gave them the ability to infinitely scale out in terms of courses and offerings going forward.