Sector(s)
Overview: The American Council on Education (ACE) leads advocacy efforts that shape public policy, helping colleges and universities.
ACE’s peer-to-peer online learning platform, Engage, was developed to improve equity, expand access to colleges and universities, and diversify the higher education leadership pipeline. ACE needed to add new functionalities and tools to improve community interactions within the platform, which was a feature that their current technology did not support.
About the project
The project was a high priority for ACE, and they requested a short window. We had less than three months to complete the work—but that wasn’t the only complication.
Perhaps the biggest challenge was in the implementation itself. As the foundational LMS platform would not change, the new tools needed to integrate into Engage and behave like they were part of the core system.
The implemented solution enabled ACE to realize substantial improvement in the flexibility of their Engage platform. The new functionality provided them with a tool that markedly improved its community’s communication, interaction, engagement, and collaboration.
We finished the project and launched well within the expected three-month timeframe, enabling the Engage community to truly engage.
Why Drupal was chosen
We created microsites in Drupal Opigno and Drupal Open Social and then embedded them into Engage. This approach enabled us to design a seamless UX that did not force the site user to gain the new interactive functions or make it look or feel like they were leaving the site.
We accomplished it using the “Learning Tools Interoperability” specification, which allowed us to embed Drupal web applications within the interface and sync accounts and user credentials, among other things.
Features included (WCAG) 2 Level AA Conformance, SCORM compliance, and integration with H5P, which allowed ACE to create interactive videos, presentations, and quizzes, plus fully interactive timelines, and more.
Technical Specifications
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