Online platform for my business

[Geekman]

I currently run a business giving courses of various types in large companies. Most of my clients only ask for one or two courses for a small group of students. In these cases, I normally have one contact with HR, and every month I manually generate a report of student attendance and evaluation results to send them. This probably isn’t a particularly efficient way of doing it, but as they’re small groups and only one or two courses, it doesn’t take up much of my time.

However, I have one client who started small, but currently ask us to teach around 65 students, for 12 different courses. The company is divided into various legal entities, all with their own HR contact. In the past few months, I’ve experienced the following issues:

1) Students sometimes don’t attend, then message me with an excuse, and checking its validity is nothing to do with me.
2) Some students miss certain classes and then ask my teachers to send them the topics they missed, which takes a lot of time.
3) Different HR contacts need to see the attendance / results of each student.
4) Students sometimes forget which room / link the class is in.
5) Generating the monthly report for each student takes a huge amount of time.
6) Manually entering grades etc allows for a possibility of human error.

There are probably other issues that I’ve forgotten too.

My idea is to use some kind of online portal where students can log in, see all the material for each class, complete evaluations (Google Forms style) register their attendance along with any possible excuses, see evaluation dates, see class links / locations / grades etc. This portal would also allow HR to log in and see the data they require.

Something like Google Classroom would be ideal, but as I’m not an actual school, it doesn’t seem like I don't qualify to get it. I’ve tried using Seesaw but it isn’t very user friendly and lacks some of the functionality I’m looking for.

So, are there any possible solutions people are aware of? I was even thinking of paying someone to create a live excel document that we could all edit etc, but I’m not sure how viable that is. I’m happy to pay for the right application as it would save us all a significant time each year and avoid a lot of potential problems.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[akirk]

Would software such as Moodle deliver for you?
The description you give suggests that you might need something more bespoke - but that way lies large bills...
If you can find a decent piece of software which does most of what you need and has an API then you can have bespoke code (e.g. for reports) coded around the edge...

[eeLee]

If it helps, I qualified an English language school, a business, for Microsoft education discounts years ago.

Teams would likely help, my kid used this in lockdown in a similar mode.

[toohuge]

You’re describing a learning management system - LMS and it’s big business, there’s a huge industry out there dedicated to this and it can be a minefield.

I’d avoid moodle as you’ll need a team to keep it running - it’ll be hugely expensive. There’s several for Wordpress (Learndash is a popular one) but I’d not recommend this route as you’re looking to deliver and administer learning over trying to keep up with the Wordpress thing.

I’d look for a hosted LMS soliton that will require configuration but from a quick glance, I’m confident you could get something off the shelf to get you where you need to be - and then revaluation whether you need those last few %’s.
Kajabi and thinkrific would be a place to start.

But - do your research! I’d recommend a saas product to keep hassle down and course delivery up.

[Geekman]

akirk said:

Would software such as Moodle deliver for you?
The description you give suggests that you might need something more bespoke - but that way lies large bills...
If you can find a decent piece of software which does most of what you need and has an API then you can have bespoke code (e.g. for reports) coded around the edge...

I spent most of yesterday playing around with it and while it certainly has some of the functionality I'm looking for, it doesn't seem to do everything I want. I live in a country with a very low labour rate, so getting something bespoke may not be quite as expensive as in the UK but I don't really know.

eeLee said:

If it helps, I qualified an English language school, a business, for Microsoft education discounts years ago.

Teams would likely help, my kid used this in lockdown in a similar mode.

I'm reluctant to use teams as my students are used to Zoom and I think using Zoom for the classes and Teams for everything else would confuse them. It's also a lot more resource heavy and doesn't have all the functionality I need.

toohuge said:

You’re describing a learning management system - LMS and it’s big business, there’s a huge industry out there dedicated to this and it can be a minefield.

I’d avoid moodle as you’ll need a team to keep it running - it’ll be hugely expensive. There’s several for Wordpress (Learndash is a popular one) but I’d not recommend this route as you’re looking to deliver and administer learning over trying to keep up with the Wordpress thing.

I’d look for a hosted LMS soliton that will require configuration but from a quick glance, I’m confident you could get something off the shelf to get you where you need to be - and then revaluation whether you need those last few %’s.
Kajabi and thinkrific would be a place to start.

But - do your research! I’d recommend a saas product to keep hassle down and course delivery up.

Thanks. Kajabi and Thinkific look very interesting - I'm going to spend some time today researching them.