The client is a global education company, which provides core and supplemental educational materials and instruction programs to the K-12 and adult education markets. The group has various companies through which it provides a variety of books, print and electronic learning materials, assessments, and professional development programs.
LearningMate engaged with the client as a partner to develop assessment questions for 8th and 9th grade students in the United Kingdom.
LearningMate was required to author questions using an authoring tool which was still under development when the project started. Students would then attempt these questions and would be graded accordingly based upon their answers to individual questions.
LearningMate also received semi-structured inputs from the client with content being in a state which required structuring and initial analysis. The skills of people involved in the project played a pivotal role.
Subsequent to the successful authoring of the assessment questions, LearningMate was required to develop the questions, which are rendered in Flash linked to XML. Development of the questions not only required skilled design inputs but also customized functional scripting because of the complex nature of the subject matter.
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LearningMate adopted a consultative approach in:
- Understanding client’s requirements and learning to use the authoring tool
- Understanding the risks involved in using an under-development authoring tool
- Planning to mitigate any problems that could or could not be foreseen while using the under-development authoring tool
- Devising alternate approaches for the product development whenever necessary
- Improving the product development process to analyze the inputs and ensure clarity of scope
- Developing a quality product without extensive verification and testing because of a streamlined production process, ensuring minimum rework
- Determining from source content the complexity levels of each assessment question, with simultaneously evaluating if the question could be authored and developed using the client’s tools
- Enhancing the capabilities of the authoring tool through appropriate suggestions to the client
- Understanding the use and capabilities of the development tool and its output rendered as an XML document
- Devising an efficient process of editing the XML scripts to achieve the required product functionality
LearningMate ensured an error-free product delivered to the client within planned schedules. The product set new standards in pedagogical excellence and reaffirmed LearningMate’s ability to deal with changing authoring paradigms in e-learning. |
