Some interesting outcomes reported by Omniplex after a survey conducted at the Learning Techonlogies 2010 conference earlier this year include the following:
“One priority was people looking to migrate from an existing learning management system (LMS) to a system that is easier to use,” revealed Matthew Lloyd, managing director of Omniplex.
“This reflects the trend towards organisations taking control of their LMS in-house – along with the trend to develop their own e-learning materials in-house, which has boosted demand for such things as rapid authoring tools which can be used by in-house subject matter experts rather than by professional e-learning designers and developers.
This is exactly our focus. We empower companies to build the content themselves – and it’s all included in our monthly rate. You get the LMS and all the tools you need to create content right in the web browser. And being easy to use is one of our main mantras.
You can’t walk very far in the learning technologies industry without bumping into moodle. Whenever we start talking about our system we often get the response:
But what about moodle?
I’m going to leave the answer to that for another post, but as a bit of background to this issue, take a look at a post by Donald Clark, entitled Moodle: e-learning’s Frankenstein. A fantastic introduction to the evolution of e-learning’s most simultaneously loved and hated son.
We make no secret of going on about the many benefits of e-learning but it’s always interesting to keep up on the latest research into the area. Towards Maturity has a piece up on their site pointing to a new piece of research from Becta titled Delivering results with learning technology in the workplace. The investigation centred across a number of themes which learning technologies deliver benefits on:
Time Saving
Productivity Gains
Staff Benefit
Business Impact
Tangible quality improvement for learning
Impact of Social Learning
Green Issues
Cost Savings
The report itself is well worth diving into (all 76 pages) and the links to a large number of case studies at the end of the document are also worth looking at.
We firmly believe in the business benefits of e-learning, and if we can deliver on our goal of delivering a low cost platform, then we can only add to the benefits seen above.
This is a follow up to out previous post about our infrastructure which is can be found here: Infrastructure Part 1
There is the intention to go a bit deeper with this post, as well as mention what was forgotten in the first post, as mentioned when customers and users were asking questions such as “Well, nice post but how do you debug?“.
Debugging a web application is always tricky because of the specific nature of the medium. There are a lot of options available and there is the well known xDebug. XDebug projects the traditional debugger approach, like the use of breakpoints and object inspection to the web environment. For our application, the combination of FireBug with FirePhp works (almost) perfectly. One reason for this is that FirePhp integrates well with Zend framework which we are already using.
There are many popular modern development methodologies such as TDD or about more modern ones such as AOP or Continuous Integration. Our project is in favour of using tests, like phpUnit, because of familiarity with other *Unit (mainly jUnit) frameworks. Test Driven Development has been extremely helpful and beneficial, although currently we do not use it as much as we should.
Google is a household name, so no introduction is needed, but definitely worth to be mentioned. Google Documents help us a lot in editing documents with partners from all over the world or all over our office, available 24×7 by just using any available browser. The same idea as with notion learning, your web based e-learning platform.
Gnome’s dia is an unsung hero that I happen to use extensively from my university years, many of diagrams you stumble across in blog post academical or other papers have been produced with this pretty elegant multi-platform tool. It is not part of an IDE or any other application development platform and it’s UML capabilities have not yet been utilized, but it is great for small
clean and tidy diagrams.
Dropbox belongs to the family of tools that belong to the cloud/storage family. Drop-box had the approach to files that google documents had to document editing, a very nice description is here: https://www.dropbox.com/tour#6.
It is very common for us when we talk to customers and attend events for people to ask us questions about our infrastructure and the rationale behind our choices. It is a very common question in the startup ecosystem for different reasons such as getting the feel for the company’s profile or as a source of inspiration for people’s projects.
This post goes into detail on our entire development stack from top to bottom.
There are many choices here and all are supported with very good arguments. based on our organizational structure and the decision to support linear development (which means minimal branching), the choice was for traditional source control tools (instead of distributed ones such as GIT/perforce). Because of extensive exposure to subversion and it’s general acceptance, we chose this.
Because we are a SaaS company and we generally prefer using services, we also have an on-line hosting package for it.
This is a very open discussion and there is a nice chapter titled “So Many Platforms, So Many Options”, from The Web Startup Sucess Guide, by Bob Walsh. We had decided before to use PHP on top of linux. Our distribution of choice is ubuntu, with which we are very familiar.
In PHP, the choices are really endless. We chose Zend Framework for the following reasons:
Familiarity: already used it in (smaller) projects in the past
Leverage as much or as little of it as we want
Supplementary tools available as we upscale, such as the rest of the Zend platform
The best element inside the Zend framework is that a software house can use as many features of it as they want, without getting into trouble. You can use the MVC, or you can just do it on your own with mod-rewrites. This goes all along the framework, which is good both in terms of being able to do custom development on what we needed different, as well as a smaller learning curve: when the project had to do some things urgently, the fastest approach was taken, and then when familiarity and exposure to the framework was better, we re-implemented those features in the framework’s ontology.
jQuery Simple, easy choice . Better supported, large user base, ease of use, number of plugins, nice and diverse community (eg. designers, coders, etc). We could not have thought of anything else, although we considered MooTools because of the Zend Framework integration.
There are many custom builds for Eclipse, our main one is the following: Eclipse for PHP Developers, which is tailored to our needs and has nice features such as code completion, subversion integration and many others.
We also use Komodo edit from Active state, which may be a good candidate for a future IDE. Both of those are cross platform. In each developer’s platform the following mini-IDEs/editors are utilized:
There is a very old post about that here. Many things have changed since then, but the choice remains the same: PostgreSQL. Now I have more arguments in favour of it:
Cohesive and easy to find documentation
Clear licensing – see what’s going on with MySQL/Sun/Oracle
Feature Set
But most of all it is very dependable and stable. I know that it is not the most popular choice and that we have issues with software that runs on top of MySQL only, but we are very happy and confident for our choice and no company can take it away from us.
We chose Backup Ninja because it had a very small learning curve.
We might evaluate more options in the future, when we re-evaluate our backup strategy. Also
Gnu Privacy Guard is being use to encrypt the backups so that they can be transmitted and stored remotely.
On Wednesday and Thursday we went to Learning Technologies 2010 to promote Notion Learning and check out the competition. And the simple take-away is this: Even in 2010, corporate LMSs still look awful. Every single stand displayed the same tab interface across the top, with the same table structures showing competency frameworks and training interfaces. Watching sales professionals demo the systems was hilarious: Page after page of complicated forms, just to assemble simple courses and handle training assignment. Bamboozled visitors watched, realising that they’d have to have 3 weeks of training just to get started with these ugly systems.
Things have moved on. There were some interesting speakers, particularly around mobile. Mobile has moved from ‘beta’ style implementations in 2009 to a must have part of e-learning strategies for organisations. The gold-rush was on with many companies keen to show off their mobile implementations.
Also on Wednesday night, we had a stand at Innovate London Showcase 2010 at the Thames Innovation Centre.
We got some posters and flyers printed:
Nothing like repeating your pitch every couple of minutes at a stand to help improve it!
Welcome to our blog. We're building a web based learning and training management system. This blog details the development of our startup. To find out more,go to the About link page at notionlearning.com.
. Better supported, large user base, ease of use, number of plugins, nice and diverse community (eg. designers, coders, etc). We could not have thought of anything else, although we considered 
