All about WebTutor

WebTutor facilitates mentoring relationships between professional faculty and learners worldwide. WebTutor is a customizable learning environment that can be adapted for many e-learning scenarios from schools to corporate training portals.

WebTutor allows for a structured relationship between teachers and learners and allows for not only 1-1 but also 1-many, many-1 and many-many relationships. Communication between the relationships is via a secured email system that protects individual privacy and is a safety net in the case of young learners.

WebTutor is not only an LMS but it also consists of several open source applications. The simple solution for an LMS is to use Moodle which is an open source LMS (among one of the best LMS in ranking). We chose Drupal as a CMS (it is one of the best CMS in open source rating 4.2 from 5), and to manage groups and custom searches we use CiviCRM (quite obviously, it too is best of class open source solution).

So WebTutor can be thought of as an integrated open source solution.

The 3 components are:

Drupal

Moodle

CiviCRM

Drupal (Content Management):

Drupal provides the functionality of Content Management. Drupal is very robust, secure and user friendly CMS. It provides features such as user management, content management, role based permissions and supports various modules such as blogs/forum/chat/notice boards/shopping carts/advertisements and banners.  http://www.drupal.org/

Moodle (Learning Management):

Moodle is a platform to conduct fully online courses. It has different activity modules to build richly collaborative communities of learning around your customized subject matter.

http://moodle.org

CiviCRM (Relationship Management):

CiviCRM is a contact manager database. It has features to manage information about members, create roles and relationships like student – teacher relationship between contacts, manage communication among members, create and manage events. http://civicrm.org

Challenge in integrating the Open Source Components.

After deciding on the Open Source component to be used, the next major challenge was to integrate these Open Source components. It was a concept never tried before. The decision revolved around the architecture of the system as it had to deal with CMS (Content Management System), LMS (Learning Management System), CRM (Constituent Relationship Management). The system was required to serve various purposes viz. group searches, create different projects, exams, quizzes and assignments, content upload, one–on–one messaging, handle different roles, ...

In order to meet the purposes of the system decisions such as the system work flow process, how to use the selected components, how to put them together, how and which parts of these components should be talking with each other and the data exchange between the components posed a challenge in integrating the components.

Technical Integration

To make all three systems communicate with each other we created a custom module, which use a single sign on. And all details of user distributed to all the 3 systems. The module creates functionality of grouping in the CMS automatically in the LMS and the CRM.

User Integration

Drupal and CiviCRM user tables interact with each other and the two user data sets act as one single data set. This feature is provided by CiviCRM. Drupal users can access Moodle via the Drupal login. This feature is provided by the Moodle Connect module of Drupal. There was no direct integration available between CiviCRM and Moodle and it had to be achieved through a custom module. This architecture allowed us to use Moodle Communication and Moodle Course management, Drupal Content Management and CiviCRM Relationship management and mailing System.

Project Management Architecture

Fig : A simple representation of how Moodle data is displayed on Drupal

NOTE: The green arrow indicates that this connection needed customization

Project Integration  

Moodle has a project management system where a teacher can create different projects for learners, create assignments, quiz, questionnaires, and lessons, upload files, and grade them accordingly. However, the system required that these be displayed in the Drupal CMS. This integration was not available. We created a customized module to integrate this and display the course data and other parameters directly upon login to Drupal.

Relationship Management:

Relationship Integration

Drupal allows creating users and defining their role. It also allows you to define relationship between various roles. However, these relationships are not available in Moodle and had to be achieved through a customized module.

The user profiles are created and available in CiviCRM. These user profiles are available in Drupal but not available in Moodle. A customized module was created to make CiviCRM profiles available in Moodle.

Communication

 CiviMail has been used for mass mailing and to facilitate communication among members. The learners’ communication was required to be automatically transmitted to the concerned supervisor/teacher on a daily basis. This was achieved by slightly tweaking the CiviMail architecture. Role based groupings were designed to facilitate communication and easy search. Moodle based messaging system was used to facilitate communication among the users and group members. Blogs, forums and chats modules were also integrated into the system.

A WebTutor portal developed using the concept of Integrated Open Source Solution is available for preview at www.learningdecoded.com

The WebTutor developed had following features:

Administrator Features

Monitor System - The site administrator monitors the whole system. He can maintain the logs and also keep a check on users taking part in the system.

Manage WebTutor Team members - The WebTutor team members are given approval by the Administrator. The Administrator gives the desired level of access to the WebTutor team.

Monitor and verify backup systems - The Administrator manages the backup of the system on a regular basis.

Monitor system logs - The Administrator can monitor the system logs regularly and take any action if required.

WebTutor Team Features

Define roles - WebTutor team can define roles for the portal. The permissions of the different roles can be managed by the WebTutor Team. Thus, individuals could have access to different features.

Post Projects - WebTutor Team adds projects to the portal.

Assign Projects - WebTutor Team approves the request for existing projects from Teachers, Learners, or Students and then assigns them based on the merits of the request.

Monitor Project - WebTutor Team also monitors the status of the projects undertaken by Students and Teachers. The WebTutor Team can suggest changes to the Teachers in the schedules they design for a particular project.

Group Mail - WebTutor Team can keep updating the members of the site with any new projects or new ideas of projects and also upcoming events, quizzes, taking place on the site so that everyone benefits from that. The WebTutor Team can send group mails for this purpose.

User Features

Register - Users can register in the system and then roles are assigned to them by the WebTutor team. Search Projects - Users can select projects from different categories and choose the projects of their interest, then send the request to the WebTutor team for approval to be assigned that project.

Search Knowledgebase – User can search through knowledge management system for various items.