Managing Online Training For An Educational Institute

MIT College of Insurance (MIT COI) is one of the many institutes of Maharashtra Academy of Educational Research (MAEER), Pune. Offering post graduate diplomas in Risk and Insurance Management, Fire Protection Engineering, Piping Design and Engineering, Energy Management and others, it aims to cater to the needs of a skilled manpower in the field of Insurance and Risk Management.

At the time of engagement with Upside Learning, in 2006, managing training was a big challenge for MIT COI. It was in need of a stable Learning Management System to conduct online training of insurance related courses and provide course-end certificates. Strict vigilance on the time spent, along with IP and MAC address tracking of each learner was of utmost priority for any LMS under consideration.

Upside Learning customized its Learning Management System, UpsideLMS, to address MIT COI’s requirements of eLearning delivery and management. The customized system was designed to focus on 2 modules, namely - Administrator module and the Learner module. Each of these modules had specific purpose and privileges.

The Administrator module was granted all administrative activities, like registering learners, assigning courses to the learners, providing course-end certificates, and tracking the training progress using MIS reporting. Creating invoices for MIT COI’s corporate clients was also a facility provided to the administrator.

The Learner module was built in accordance to the stringent requirements by MITCOI. A countdown timer was implemented to indicate the total time left for the course access. To check the knowledge gained by the learner, the system was configured to pop questions at random intervals. Correspondingly, the MAC and IP addresses were also tracked.

Apart from this, a separate account portal with login was also provided to each of MIT COI’s clients to enable them to track the progress of their sponsored learners.

Components that were activated for MIT COI to make learner’s training more fruitful were:

1. Online exam module
2. Chat and forum facility
3. Course structure for sequential delivery of learning material
4. Helpdesk and FAQ module
5. Access log reports
6. MIS reporting with some custom built reports

Using UpsideLMS, MIT COI was able to deliver premium quality courses, which helped it attract nationwide learners.

In the Learner module, a new evolutionary security system featuring Captcha was introduced to avoid automated responses by bots. Taking the system security a notch higher was a unique ‘password by SMS’ facility. Here, on registration, the system was configured to shoot a unique password after each logout to the learner’s mobile via SMS. This was a radical development in the security field where earlier passwords were being sent via emails.

The Upside Learning team solely managed the MIT servers for data maintenance and disaster recovery. This helped the system to be available 24x7 and ensured that the learners complete their courses in time.

UpsideLMS continues to be the backbone of MIT COI’s insurance training and the institute has been able to deliver courses to more than 70,000 students till date with very less friction.

1. Time tracked training – With the time tracker for the eLearning courses, the overall training function became very coherent. With an increasing usage of the LMS, MIT COI not only enjoyed cost savings but also established a reliable way of training their learners.

2. Cost savings were achieved by providing training to students spread across different locations.

3. Hassle-free engagement - A quick-response from Upside Learning support team ensured that the training team at MIT COI could focus on the training related activities without distraction from IT/ technology part.

UpsideLMS runs on Apache Tomcat 6.0 and MS SQL Server 2005. The LMS is supported by 3 high end configuration server machines hosted in a Tier 3, ISO 27001:2005 data center. The hardware (with 4 GB RAM and 160 GB HDD per server) was supplied by MITCOI.

1. Stringent time tracking of learner’s course access
2. Tracking of IP and MAC address
3. Highly secured system with ‘password by SMS facility’
4. Captcha to avoid automated responses by bots
5. Round the clock monitoring of portal, technical support & end user assistance

“MIT COI has been associated with Upside for more than four years now. It has been a wonderful experience working with them. Their promptness in solving issues during critical periods has helped us in keeping our systems in order and our customers happy.

I wish them all the best for their future ventures.”

Susheel Kumar PandhuDeputy Director, MIT COI, India

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