Introduction
CLB offices in Belgium mostly employ social workers who regularly attend learning courses as part of their jobs. These courses can be both obligatory and optional as well as recurring or one-time only. They can even be free or not depending on the course. Also, each CLB workplace has different rules and regulations about courses their employees need to attend.
When we were employed for this project, their system of registering courses was done manually and as their team grew, they needed a more automated approach.
Idea
The idea was to create a learning management system for course registration from scratch. The client needed a solution that would simplify the process of monitoring course attendance with added functionalities such as course creation, attendee approval, user management, and invoicing.
Challenge
The solution had to be accessible by CLB employees and adhere to high-security protocols. So, when we opted for integration with the Belgian SSO (single login), the main challenge was communication with the provider and the client. All while making sure that the login was successfully integrated with our system. Another challenge was that payment was necessary for some courses so we needed to integrate our platform with an external provider for payment processing.
Final product
The final solution was a learning management system (web app) now called Academie which is used by more than 2000 users. CLB employees can easily confirm or deny their attendance and CLB admins can monitor who enrolled in a course, create courses, cancel or postpone courses, etc. With an SSO (single login) we managed to comply with the strict confidentiality protocols since employees can only use their ID to log in. Also, we facilitated course payment by automatically sending all the necessary info to an external provider.
Course lifecycle
CLB admins can create a course from scratch and define many parameters such as title, speakers, location, time, the maximum number of participants, etc. We also implemented a system for tracking the course lifecycle so both admins and users can track its progress with tags such as postponed, announced, open for registration, etc.
Users flow
Employees can access the users' dashboard and have an overview of the courses they are and can be enrolled in. A system for tracking users' status such as applied, approved/denied, registered, etc. was also employed so both users and admins can check their status in-app.
Tech solution
For the development of the web app, we opted for Java and the Spring Boot Framework. The solution was fully integrated into the CLB ecosystem — including a SAML SSO integration with the company’s Identity provider services (login with Belgian e-id). For front-end development, we used Angular and hosted on AWS.
Benefits for the client
The main benefit for the client was the complete digitalization and automation of their learning management processes. This includes the reduced possibility of errors in communication, efficient platform maintenance, and user-friendly and intuitive UI.