African Leadership University is a world-class tertiary education institution that focuses on developing Africa’s future leaders by leveraging peer-to-peer learning, technology advances, real-world project-based learning, and skills development.
Build an efficient learning platform that prioritizes peer-to-peer interaction and social learning, improving students’ online learning process through an enhanced collaborative learning experience.
Overall, contributes to ALU’s ambitious goal of training 3 million entrepreneurial and ethical leaders for Africa and the world by 2060.
Build ALU’s learning portal on an Open edX powered Learning Management System
Design a more streamlined navigation to improve usability
Provide students with tools to track their learning progress and growth
Create a platform more focused on cross-course than course-specific collaboration
Iterative Process
We communicated with them periodically in the design process through standup meetings, status updates and collaborative tools such as Trello to gain feedback and direction.
Open edX configuration with Discourse
After doing some research, we identified Discourse to be the most suitable platform for ALU’s edX learning integration and proceeded to build Discourse discussion boards for students to learn better through community-based knowledge exchange.
Being able to view and track course progress and upcoming assignments through a comprehensive chart to help students learn effectively and stay updated with new discussions.
The leadership dashboard consists of coach marks as learning guides, a prominent call-to-action button, and specific goals setting feature for students to create a clear learning framework.
Option to filter discussions according to categories and update, search, notification and categories feature to facilitate cross course social learning.
Despite the constrained schedule, we were able to build an effective Open EdX online learning platform for ALU through several sprints and transparent communication in the product development process. The platform allowed ALU to deliver its online courses more efficiently towards achieving its vision of creating the future leaders of Africa.
