Key Challenges

PHFI Center for Distance Learning Ballistic  Learning  improves  student  access  with  Enhanced  e-­‐Learning  Portal  

Overview The Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) through its capacity building initiatives is trying to develop a critical mass of public health professionals who can skillfully assess the dimensions of public health issues, determine appropriate strategies to meet emerging challenges and apply such knowledge to improve the health systems, empower public health programs and influence policy decisions.

“Distance Education has the potential to deliver quality education to cohorts of learners who might otherwise are unable to attend campus-based classes due to geographic locations, work schedules, or other life circumstances.”

Prof. K. Srinath Reddy President, Public Health Foundation India

With an enduring dedication to the pursuit of excellence, PHFI established PHFI Centre for Distance Learning to offer programs through e-learning across key areas of public health practice. PHFI partnered with Ballistic Learning in the for consulting & improvement of their existing learning Processes.

Ballistic Learning assisted PHFI in automating their enrolment and registration process by creating a web-portal integrated with e-Commerce. PHFI’s Moodle LMS was customized so that the students get the opportunity to learn in a flexible, self-paced environment that makes use of the latest learning technologies with interaction with the faculty and fellow students across the globe.

CHALLENGE Having launched their Distance Education e-Learning program in the year 2011, PHFI was struggling with :

Ø  Since PHFI offers distance education programs, they didn’t have a web-portal to inform and educate learners about their courses.

Ø  Manual student registration, enrolment & payment management processes Ø  Manual eligibility and approval process was nightmare for faculties and overhead

on top of academic requirements Ø  Instructor-led session were delivered using a separate system and the recordings

were to be manually compressed and uploaded by faculties. Ø  No concept of notifications about academic schedules, virtual sessions, upcoming

assignments & assessments Ø  User-experience was not great and students struggled in finding learning

resources for their applicable terms Ø  The LMS was only used for delivering the learning resources whereas the grading

was manually done Ø  Issue of certificate of completion was hassle. There was no way to check the

authenticity by the employers.

SOLUTION While analyzing PHFIs requirements Ballistic Learning found that the functionality they needed could not be handled by Moodle development alone. This would lead to over-customization of Moodle which would cause performance as well as up gradation problems.

•  As BL had experience of developing e-learning portals by integrating Drupal with Moodle, we proposed this as a solution which PHFI accepted. By integrating Moodle and Drupal via their respective API layers we were able to build a system which provided PHFI with:

•  A full-fledged Portal application where they could manage all their distance learning announcements and course related promotional and other information (Drupal)

•  Student Admissions and Approval process workflows (Drupal) •  Delivery and tracking of instructional resources, teaching activity and assessment

(Moodle) •  Tightly integrated (with Moodle) Virtual Classroom platform for real-time online

classes (WizIQ) •  Ease of administration of the combined system as exchange of relevant data

between Moodle and Drupal was instantaneous •  We assisted PHFI in setting up the combined system on their servers. PHFI is

successfully using the platforms.

OTHER AREAS BL WORKED WITH PHFI

Ø  Advisory on how to make e-learning successful Ø  Development of 6 learning hours of rich, narrated, interactive LMS ready e-

learning modules Ø  Integrating cutting edge HTML5 e-learning content authoring tool (H5P) with

Moodle

WHY PHFI CHOSE BL

Ø  Vast range of development and deployment expertise. BL’s portfolio included all that PHFI was looking for

Ø  Intellectual sophistication of management team PHFI have had unsatisfactory experiences with earlier vendors. They were pleasantly surprised that Ballistic Learning was a one-stop entity where all their e-learning development requirements were being met effectively.