Apollo Education Group delivers personalised learning and in-LMS communication with custom Totara Learn plugins

Apollo Education Group has been a leading global provider of education for over 40 years and Apollo Professional Development exists to help companies achieve their talent and training goals.

Apollo Education work with companies to help them adapt their existing instructor-led training to create an Apollo ACE learning experience, alternatively they can leverage the existing content library to work with partners and with the development support from BuildEmpire Ltd build an Apollo ACE learning experience for almost any learning requirement.

The Challenge

Apollo came to BuildEmpire with a huge challenge – to change the status quo for online learning. In order to meet this goal, they needed a development team to build a bespoke learning environment which would make training engaging, interactive and high quality.

From an administrator point of view, the LMS needed to be customisable. Apollo needed to deliver a fully branded platform to their partners. It also needed to be responsive, and allow educators to interact with learners in different ways.

There were several key requirements for the solution. The training needed to be extremely flexible, and content creators needed a variety of templates to work with. Trainers and learners also needed to be able to communicate through the platform, and the LMS needed to cater for blended learning and collaboration.

The Solution

For this project, the learning  management system Totara Learn was an excellent place to start. As a Totara partner, BuildEmpire could offer this as a solution to Apollo. But the team didn’t stop there. The platform needed to be customised to the max in order to meet Apollo’s needs, so we set to work building plugins for Totara to make the bespoke, feature-packed LMS Apollo dreamed of.

The LMS was built in PHP, and used the Totara framework and guidelines.

Some of the Totara plug-ins BuildEmpire built for Apollo included:

• Overarching themes which meant Apollo could deliver standardised branding across their e-learning
• New content templates, giving Apollo the freedom to structure their courses as needed
• Messaging systems, enabling learners and trainers to correspond via the LMS
• Engagement points system, so learners and educators can track how well they are engaging with the course material
• Functionality to allow learners to interact with course material, such as adding notes, asking questions and saving extracts
• A place for people to learn through collaboration

All learning activities were built bespoke for Apollo (including video activities, transcripts, audio learning… and more).

The Results

The platform caters for on-boarding, professional skills training or initiatives such as developing an innovation culture. Both BuildEmpire and Apollo are very proud of the end product, having stretched the platform in ways they had not first thought possible, in order to deliver an exceptional online learning experience quite different to the traditional platforms on offer.

The unique learning experience Apollo are now able to offer is engaging, interactive, and enables an educator to communicate with the student via the learning platform, giving personalised feedback and monitoring engagement and progress.

Since the launch of the project, Apollo have been able to successfully implement this solution into multiple bluechip organisations.