CCO System: Maximizing User Adoption For An Ortho Leader

Introduction

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are an integral part of any organization that needs to provide educational courses, resources and training programs to different sets of users. Often times, it’s difficult to find an LMS that meets the complex demands of a multifaceted organization.

Situation

Complete Clinical Orthodontics (CCO) is an organization of orthodontists whose goal it is to capitalize on the wealth of knowledge available to orthodontists and to incorporate new technology and proven concepts to achieve a higher level of efficiency. The organization needed an LMS that professors, students and clinicians could access to view a variety of content including recorded webinars, articles, case studies, quick tip videos, manuals, games and more.

Solution

Station8 helped the orthodontics leader overcome the daunting challenge of creating a simple, yet effective LMS designed to maximize user adoption. Here’s a look at the custom solution we implemented to meet their unique needs.

User Adoption Through A Simple, Effective Model

The acceptance of a new tool by a specific groups of users is called technology adoption lifecycle. For CCO, we needed to determine what it would it take for the organization’s user groups — which are comprised of professors, students and clinicians — to adopt a new LMS.

In the technology adoption lifecycle, users who adopt a tool are chronologically classified as innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and phobics.

With the CCO “innovators” group — those involved in the website design and development process — we held weekly meetings to explain the new system and its features in an effort to make the adoption process as smooth as possible. For the “early adopters” group, comprised primarily of professors, we created a series of 1 minute how-to videos . With the “early majority” group, consisting predominantly of students, we removed all manual setups, clicks and forms typically required to take the courses of their professors. Students can simply provide their university email address, name and password at registration, and they’ll be matched with professors.

To be sure, there are a lot of great LMSs available. When this project started out, we analyzed a wide variety of systems, however none offered the complete set of functions that CCO required. In addition, many systems included superfluous functions that would result in a poor user experience — especially for the professor demographic, who are the major content curators of the site. To facilitate adaptation, we created a custom LMS that provides the specific functions required by CCO. These features include login, registration and profile system features; front-end user submissions; and changing content based on user roles.

Let’s take a closer at these features and how we incorporated them into the LMS.

Login, Registration and Profile System Features

User registration was the first challenge we faced with the CCO LMS. While it seems like a simple function with a powerful CMS like WordPress, much is involved in creating a custom solution with user registration. These challenges include creating different types of users and different emails they get, customizing registration fields based on the user roles and creating redirects to different pages after logging in with different user roles.

Fortunately, a great solution exists that meets the needs of CCO . It’s called Profile Builder Plugin Pro by Cozmoslabs. This tool allows you to customize your website by adding front-end registration, profile and login forms. According to Cozmolab’s website, “to achieve this, just create a new page, and give it an intuitive name (i.e. Edit Profile). Now all you need to do is add the following shortcode: [wppb-edit-profile]. Publish your page and you are done. Profile Builder is the all in one user registration and management plugin for WordPress sites.”

Front-end User Submissions

The second challenge we faced was creating an easy-to-use interface for the professors to add their own courses. To avoid sending professors to the WordPress backend to create their courses, we created a front-end submission form using an Advanced Custom Field plugin.

Advanced Custom Fields offers a robust and developer friendly system to create forms on your site. With the help of these forms, users can submit and edit their own content and you don’t need to worry about content creation. It is a powerful functionality for the websites that requires fresh content for hundreds of contributors. The initial feedback we received from professors, showed popularity with the simplicity of this form:

Changing Content Based On User Roles

The third initiative we implemented let us change content based on user roles.

WordPress is a great CMS with many built in functions. User roles and capabilities allow developers to code websites that can serve content based on user roles. You can also find many membership plugins that create this functionality. Since our needs for this project were straightforward, we implemented a built-in WordPress function current_user_can.

Success in Creating a Customized Experience

As an international organization, CCO also required serving content in various languages. Many CCO system contributors are fluent in Spanish, and provide content in English and Spanish. In addition, the CCO System caters to an international community, and their manuals are translated in in several languages. We were able to create a customized experience that allowed users to upload and access these materials.

Conclusion

Identifying the right LMS can be time consuming process. With the wide variety of systems available in today’s market, it’s important to first understand your objectives. By clearly identifying your user demographics, user needs, and learning goals, you can make the best effort to implement an LMS that successfully meets the needs of your business and fosters adoption.