Drupal Based E-Learning Portal: offCourse

Life flows very fast, the concept of time has become very different especially in recent years, everything has become much faster and more mobile. People are willingly or unwillingly striving to achieve much more work in a short time. As such, receiving education over the internet has become increasingly popular.

E-learning is the name given to web-based education, learning and knowledge management activities carried out by individuals through internet technologies. Especially as someone who works closely with educational institutions such as universities, I observe that institutions are looking for a way to provide new gains to their employees through e-learning. There are various ready-made e-learning software, some software serves over cloud services, which we call cloud, and some software is self-hosted, that is, it works by installing it on the institutions' own servers. The dynamics and therefore the needs of each institution differ. In some institutions, different training methods are used, while in some institutions, reporting, follow-up and analysis after training are much more important.

When we were offered an e-learning software development project by offCourse  A.Ş., we decided to develop a special software for the institution, taking into account the needs and demands communicated to us, and based on the point mentioned above, we decided that we could not solve this need with the existing software. The issue we trusted the most while making this decision was the flexible structure and powerful architecture of Drupal.

We can list the basic features that should be in this e-learning system as follows;

• This system had to be very flexible, new additions should be made in parallel with the needs after development, we should be able to produce reports as we wanted.
• Corporate and individual courses should be offered, individuals should be able to take courses on their own through this application if they wish, or institutions should be able to easily define courses for their employees.
• Users should be able to easily purchase individual trainings with credit cards.
• There should be a very flexible course definition screen and training materials such as announcements, videos, tests/quizzes, homework should be reusable and easily added to the courses.
• The courses should be easily followed by the users receiving the training and they should be able to continue the training from the point where they left off.
  Corporate users should be able to create classes and projects, and the performances of the users receiving the relevant training in the class should be followed in detail by the company officials.
• The videos in the trainings should have been able to be watched by the users via streaming method, and the users should have been able to view these videos only on the website.
• Membership in the e-learning system should be very easy, even users should be able to easily register to the website with their social media accounts.
  Above all, the e-learning portal should have a secure infrastructure.

In fact, apart from the items listed above, there were more issues to be considered during the development phase, but I think these will be enough. After the needs were clearly and understandably determined, it was time for the design and software development process.

The most important starting point of successful projects is the creation of a correct visual design and software architecture. If you can understand the customer's request correctly, it will not be very difficult to create the desired product. In this framework, we have created a very clean, understandable, easy-to-read and modern design.

The most important step of a successful Drupal project is to create a correct site configuration and content model. If you plan the project correctly at the very beginning, you will progress much faster afterwards. We did the same, firstly we configured the site, installed the necessary modules, made the settings, then we created the content types and built the relationships between these content types. We determined the most basic content type of the e-learning portal as a course and created other content types such as quiz/test, announcement, video, explanation, assignment around this content type.

Even though Drupal provides you with an infrastructure that you can easily develop with ready-made modules, you may need to develop custom modules for special needs. We have developed many custom modules for offCourse. We actively used rules to inform the users at every stage of the training, but we made additional improvements at points where rules were not triggered. I don't want to bore you with too many technical details in this article. As a result, we have implemented a successful project that we are proud of with Drupal modules supported by the community, custom theme and module development.

I am sharing a few reasons why you should develop an e-learning project with Drupal below, but there are actually many more reasons than the ones we have listed.

• Drupal provides a secure, flexible and scalable infrastructure.
• You can easily create any content structure with content types, then you can easily perform operations such as creating new fields and content types.
• With Views, you can list all kinds of content and display content according to user authorisations.
• Drupal can be integrated with all kinds of systems and infrastructures, both payment systems and web services such as Amazon can be integrated.
• It provides a very flexible user and role structure.
• If needed, any number of languages can be added with multi-language support.
• It is a content management platform that is constantly developing/improving with its active and working developer community.

offCourse is currently actively used by both individual users and very important companies of our country.