Building Educational Experiences with Learnosity

One of our long-term clients, CEV Multimedia, Ltd., has been providing innovative educational materials for the last 30 years. CEV specializes in providing quality curriculum and educational resources for the subject areas of Agricultural Science & Technology, Business & Marketing, Family & Consumer Sciences, Trade & Industry, and Career Orientation. CEV’s teaching materials were originally distributed on VHS tapes, followed by CD and DVD, and now are delivered through the web.

Over the last few years, we have worked with the team at CEV to create an online learning platform known as iCEV. This online learning platform makes it easy for teachers and students to find and view educational videos, download worksheets and assignments, and find other quality content in several subject areas.

In the summer of 2014, CEV wanted to add interactive assignments, quizzes and tests to the existing platform. Instead of trying to reinvent these features and functionality from scratch, CEV partnered with Learnosity. Learnosity provides a set of tools and services that power the next generation of assessment products. Offered through a software-as-a-service model, Learnosity provides modular and flexible learning tools that can be integrated into any existing site.

With a powerful authoring system, Learnosity allows educators to create 51 different types of questions including multiple choice, sort lists, match lists, draw-on-an-image questions, cloze questions, number lines, and math essay. For CEV’s content areas, we used mostly multiple choice and order lists, but CEV continues to create new innovative questions as Learnosity adds question types. The figure below shows the Learnosity authoring platform that is used to create the questions.

Once the questions have been authored, there are several ways in which they can be grouped together to form activities and assessments. These activities can then be embedded on your own site. For CEV, we used Learnosity’s powerful API to embed activities into the iCEV product directly so that users don’t ever leave the iCEV platform.

The figure above shows an interactive question in action on the iCEV platform. Students drag and drop the vocabulary term to match the definition.

Another valuable Learnosity feature is the reporting system. And through the API, you can embed reports right on your own site. For example, when students complete an activity on the iCEV platform, they are presented with a summary of their work.

The flexibility of the Learnosity platform was one of the reasons that it was selected by CEV. A good example of this is Learnosity’s user management features. Through the API, we were able to programmatically create users as they begin to take the assessments, and then Learnosity tracks all the student progress on various attempts at activities. This meant that we could keep the user management system we already had in place for iCEV’s users. They did not need a second login for Learnosity tools. This also allows us to track user progress to provide grade reports for students and teachers.

Lastly, as we progressed through the Learnosity integration, the Learnosity team was there to help. On a few occasions, we had questions about the API or how to accomplish something specific with it, and the staff at Learnosity were always willing to support our development via email or phone calls. They were great to work with.

If you are working on projects that require the use of some type of assessment engine, consider Learnosity. It is a robust, flexible platform that has worked well for iCEV and was easy for Smooth Fusion to integrate.

Smooth Fusion is a custom web and mobile development company and leading Progress Sitefinity CMS Partner. We create functional, usable, secure, and elegant software while striving to make the process painless for our customers. We offer a set of core services that we’ve adapted and refined for more than 250 clients over our 18 years in business. We’ve completed more than 1800 projects across dozens of industries. To talk to us about your project or review our portfolio, send us a message and one of our project managers will reach out to you quickly.