The Requirement:
PPS wanted a learning management platform to store and access rich content, located centrally and indexed, which could be easily searchable and consumed by the PPS community comprising of staff, students and in the future, parents. Their existing learning management system was limited within a class room, which only facilitated them with a class room server to manage content and display it on an electronic board. Therefore, not allowing them to freely share self-developed content and aggregate rich content developed by others within the PPS community.
PPS recognised the limitations and needed a collaborative enterprise level learning management platform that would:
- Facilitate a central content repository to add and share content collaboratively
- Ease classroom teaching by having readily available content that could be used to engage teachers and students on a day to day basis
- In addition, take care of the administrative and operational aspects.
Our Solution Approach:
Cohezia’s solution for PPS was building a learning community web app which would be user friendly, scalable, flexible, internally maintainable and robust.
The scalability requirements in terms of storage were a key challenge as rich content (Video, Images, PDFs, Presentations, Animations, etc.). The size of content was expected to grow exponentially, therefore the storage solution needed to accommodate unlimited scalability. AWS cloud storage was the best solution which allowed all required storage elasticity and API to programmatically integrate with the application.
Just storing the content is useless unless one can easily access what one needs, very quickly. This called for a robust indexing and search solution. Cohezia using it’s 10+ years of experience in enterprise search, developed an effective solution by integrating an enterprise search solution using open technologies. This allowed facet based access to content, keeping doors open for contextual data extraction and content syndication.
The application functionality was developed to solve urgent problems, but the architecture needed to accommodate functional scalability envisioned by PPS visionaries. This meant that functionality could be added or removed in the future and data models could be altered. Cohezia using it’s 12+ years of experience with CMS developed the application on a well-known open CMS, allowing all the required flexibility, functional scalability and self-management capabilities that PPS needed. This not only allows for cost effectiveness, but also allows development to be very agile.
The Technologies:
Storage Platform: Amazon S3
Hosting Platform: Amazon EC2
Enterprise Search Platform: Apache Lucene Solr
CMS Platform: Drupal 7. x
The Result:
Cohezia has provided an enterprise learning management platform with a scalable architecture that will allow them to manage content and other aspects of their learning community, independently. The result today is that the teachers with this system are able to centrally store content; they do not need to re-create content, search and use content across schools, can easily communicate with students and parents and manage operations seamlessly.