eFront Quick Overview

eFrontQuick overview

© EPIGNOSIS 2010

What is eFront?

A new generation, all-in-one learning management system (LMS /LCMS)

A tool for creating effective distant online learning communities It can be used as:

A training tool A communication tool An evaluation tool A certification tool A file management and sharing tool

It can be used as an autonomous tool but it can also be combined with: Traditional education in classroom (blended learning) Tools for synchronous learning (video-conference and virtual class)

What’s inside eFront

An environment to build lessons, to create tests, to organize content and the learning process (LCMS) The end user learning environment (LMS) A lot of tools to enrich the communication between users Tools to assess learner improvement Advanced administration and system customization tools

Basic Functions

Learning Delivery – including content management and assessment utilities

Communication tools – basic communication tools Reporting – basic reports Administration – Everything needed to cover the core

functions User interface – same across all edition platforms, making

it easy and simple to use.

Click here for commercial editions (more functions)

eFront is offered as…

Software The end-user buys the system and installs it on their

infrastructure Fixed cost and yearly updates

Service The end-user rents a virtual efront server No need to have his own infrastructure Automatic system updates and backups Monthly payments

eFront editions

Tailored for particular segments of distant learning market, eFront is available in 4 editions. Each edition builds on the previous in an incremental manner creating solutions with additional functionality.

eFrontCore functionality

Functionality presentation

eFront / Community edition

eFront Community is the open-source edition of eFront. It is a fully flexible eLearning 2.0 system capable of fulfilling a wide range of learning needs. eFront Community provides the basis of all eFront editions.

Learning Delivery / SCORM SupportCommunity Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

eFront community and community++ are SCORM 1.2 compliant and certified platforms. You can import SCORM packages or export the content you created in SCORM format and use it in any other SCORM compliant platform.

Learning Delivery / Lessons, courses, & categories

Community Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

Course management is done through the administration's interface. It involves the management of lessons, the logical organisation of lessons to categories, the bundling of several lessons as a course and the enrolment of users to lessons and courses.

Learning Delivery / Content EditorCommunity Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

eFront includes an easy to use WYSISWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) content editor, to add images, videos, sounds, java applets and mathematical types in a visual way. Experienced users can further format content using html.

Learning Delivery / File manager & Digital Library

Community Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

eFront includes an advanced file manager that allows you to upload, preview, share, zip, rename and delete files. Multiple files can be uploaded in zip format and eFront will unzip them automatically. All files uploaded to the special Digital Library folder are shared and can be downloaded by every lesson user.

Learning Delivery / Test BuildersCommunity Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

eFront has an advanced internal test builder that supports several types of tests and a wide range of question types (shown above). All questions are stored to a central pull and can be used in different tests.

Learning Delivery / Projects Community Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

You can create projects with deadlines and assign them to users. Users must upload their answer to the project, and the tutor can access it and provide a grade.

Learning Delivery / Access Rules Community Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

You can control which lessons each user has access to and the order of lesson completion. This way you can channel users through specific learning paths.

Learning Delivery / Progress Tracking Community Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

eFront informs and guides users regarding their progress inside a lesson and what remains in order to complete it.

Learning Delivery / Glossary

Each lesson has its own glossary section. When a definition is entered into the glossary, the referred word will be highlighted in its original context within the particular lesson, as shown above, indicating the definition entered.

Community Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

Communication tools / Basic ToolsCommunity Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

eFront includes several communication tools. The list includes calendar, personal messages, forum, chat and collaborative content building. The last two are shown above.

Reporting / Basic ReportsCommunity Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

eFront produces extensive reports on system access, generic system characteristics, users progress and lesson information (shown above).

Administration / User Management

eFront supports three basic types of users: Student, Professor and Administrator. Users must have a basic role, but they can also have different roles per lesson, allowing a user to be student in one lesson and a professor in another. Except the three basic roles, eFront can create descendant roles with fewer permissions, permitting the creation of "guest" users, that cannot send messages to forum or see the lesson's content.

Community Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

Administration / Technology Community Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

eFront uses current web technologies and standards to ensure an excellent user-experience. Amongst others we follow AJAX, LDAP, UNICODE, SCORM, n-tier-architecture, MODULAR extensions, CSS and strict DTD.

Administration / Multilingual Community Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

eFront has full administrative support for adding or modifying languages. Internally all content and function is unicode (UTF-8) enabled. The only thing needed to add a new language is to translate a language file.

Administration / the AdministratorCommunity Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

The administrator can control any aspect of the system through an easy to use interface. New modules support allow him to extend the functionality of the system.

Administration / ModularCommunity Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

Modules allows you to extend the basic system functionality as needed. Modules are installed and activated through the administrator interface.

Administration / Themes

Examples from a plethora of themes available. Themes can adjust color, layout and blocks position according to the user’s preferences.

Community Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

Interface / Customization and UsabilityCommunity Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

eFront can be adapted according to your needs. E.g. you can re-arrange the main page components via simple drag-and-drop (shown above), you can select the active components for your lesson, or you can change the visual theme of your installation.

Interface / SearchCommunity Yes

Commercial Editions

Yes

Search functionality is always available. You can effectively search inside lesson content, personal messages or forum messages, to obtain exactly what you are looking for.

eFrontCommercial Editions

Exploring the commercial editions

eFront commercial editions

The commercial editions of eFront build on the functionalities of the community edition in an incremental manner, to offer more complete and powerful solutions for segments of our customers.

Community ++ – Suitable for individuals / small companies wishing to set up their own online eLearning business ventureEducational – Suitable for educational organizationsEnterprise – Encompassing advanced Human Capital Development functionality.

eFront commercial editions / Community ++

eFront Community++ combines the functionalities offered in the open-sourced community edition to the ones explored below, to meet the needs of smaller companies and individual entrepreneurs wishing to set up their own online eLearning business venture.

Learning Delivery / Smart Content Import

Compatible with a variety of file types, eFront makes it easy to convert existing data directly into the database, e.g. Zip and PDF files can be imported and eFront will transform them directly into the working content tree, using folder names as unit names within the lesson.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Learning Delivery / Certifications

Certificates are awarded depending on a predetermined set of objectives being satisfied e.g. the course certificate above was awarded once the user passed all three course lessons in the order of completion, within the deadline date set and with a score above the set threshold.

User’s homepage indicating the achievement of a certificate in the course.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Communication Tools / Surveys

Creating a survey is made simple and flexible, with many options available to the creators, e.g. respondents can remain anonymous and there is a wide variety of question types to choose from. Once the survey is published, the invited users will see a notification on their homepage and until when they should complete it.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Communication Tools / Notifications

This feature allows for customised automated emails to be created for any event. These can be restricted to certain users and activated/deactivated, as above in black/red, accordingly. Very easy to manage, an efficient and reliable way to inform users automatically.

Community++

Limited

Educational

Yes

Enterprise Yes

Ecommerce / Shopping CartCommunity++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Shows users which courses they have chosen to enroll into, indicating individual as well as total prices and any discounts available, as shown above. The voucher feature allows users to enter a discount voucher code, which accordingly will adjust the balance automatically.

Ecommerce / Voucher and Discount Support

Vouchers and discounts can be entered by administrators, with the option of setting voucher codes, discount percentages and start dates. This gives administrators full control over which users are eligible for the discounts.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Ecommerce / Balance Support

A very user friendly feature, permitting users to prepay an amount towards their future purchases whilst simplifying the associated administrative process.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Social Extensions / Facebook Integration

Facebook integration allows users to login to their eLearning facility and facebook simultaneously, to view their facebook profile on their eLearning homepage. Once connection with facebook has been established, there will be no need to login separately, as shown above.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Social Extensions / System Timelines

Users can see their own history of actions whilst yielding administrators with an overview of what users are actually doing on the learning facility.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Social Extensions / Lesson Timelines

Each lesson has its own specific timeline, providing transparency of everyone’s actions for all parties associated with the lesson.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Social Extensions / User Wall & Status

Users with common lessons can write on each other’s walls, in an attempt to effectively utilize tacit knowledge within the organization. Users can also update their status, to keep anyone connected up to date e.g. the above user has written “Happy Twenty-Ten to all!!!”.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Reporting / Test Reports

Administrators and supervisors can check to see how many users have completed a specific test, how many times they tried and their average score, allowing instant access to any user’s performance.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Reporting / Test Reports

Test analysis, a feature of test reporting, allows for a quick and accurate comparison between all completed test scores, providing supervisors with valuable insights of individual performances.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Administration / GroupsCommunity++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Consolidation of users into groups allows administrators to auto-assign a variety of common content and settings, to all group users. A necessary feature for larger organizations, allowing administrators to efficiently, accurately and effortlessly register new users and manage existing ones.

Administration / Extended User ProfilesCommunity++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Administrators can customize the details required when users register, to contain more fields of information, which can be set as mandatory or optional. Above are some examples of fields that can be added, although the standard details required from any registering user are set as default.

Administration / Auto-update support

With paid editions, customers are able to auto-update their version of eFront, whilst maintaining their database intact, as long as their license is still valid. Customers can compare their installed version to the latest available, to make sure they are up-to-date.

Community++

Yes

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

eFront commercial editions / eFront Educational

eFront Educational is a flexible solution, combining the functionalities explored below to those offered in the Community++ edition. Tailored for educational organizations and colleges, it brings support for the latest eLearning standards together with advanced reporting capabilities.

Learning Delivery / SCORM 2004 4th edition

SCORM 2004 4th edition is the latest and most technologically advanced collection of standards and specifications for web-based eLearning.

Based on new standards for API and content object-to-runtime environment communication with many ambiguities of previous versions resolved, has helped create a more robust test suite which helps ensure good interoperability. Combines the ability to specify adaptive sequencing of activities that use the content objects while allowing the sharing and use of information for multiple learning objectives or competencies across content and courses for the same learner within the same LMS.

All this gives users a faster and more complete experience and allows providers to set more stringent learning paths that users must comply to.

eFront is one of the first systems to offer this level of support for SCORM.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Learning Delivery / Lesson Capacity

The administrator is able to set a maximum number of users per lesson and the access period after registration, ensuring lesson capacity is maintained.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Learning Delivery / Linked Lessons

A very useful and ergonomic feature for creating lessons, which permits the sharing of specific data between lessons e.g. a video in one lesson can be used in other lessons. This saves time and space, as the data is only stored once. As you can see above, such a link is easily achieved by sharing a folder with existing lessons.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Reporting / Time Constraint Reports

The administrator has access to a plethora of time constraint reports, from users on a course to most active users, instantly yielding valuable information, which prior to eLearning, was too time-consuming to compile.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Reporting / Event Reports

Adjustable to a specific user, lesson or course, these reports summarize all events related to the variable selected e.g. certificates issued for and historical job positions of the selected user, plus many more…

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Reporting / Group Reports

A report on a group of users, to yield various information including, registration and last login per user, lessons related to the group, group user traffic and access time.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Reporting / Certificate Reports

Generates a report showing users who obtained a certificate of a particular course, within a specified time frame, with certificates about to expire and of a specific certificate key.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Reporting / Branch Reports

Shows users within a particular branch, indicating last login and jobs assigned, lessons enrolled in and total access time per user, similar to group reports.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Reporting / Participation Reports

Offers a high level overview of user’s participation in the various eLearning mediums e.g. content viewing, tests, projects, forums. These can be time constrained per user, group, specific lesson or course.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Skill Gap / Tests & Analysis

Examines the capability of users in pursuing a role according to predetermined criteria (reflected in the questions created and chosen, as shown), ensuring that the organization efficiently allocates its human resources.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Skill Gap / Tests & Analysis

Invited users will receive a link on their homepage to access and complete the test. The results will indicate which users are most suitable for the role, thus maximizing productivity. A valuable tool for organizations, which has the potential to take workforce productivity to new levels.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Enterprise extension / Certification paths management

Depending on the version, certificates can be further managed to include an expiry date e.g. the above certificate will be valid for twelve months and users must repeat the course upon certificate expiry. This is particularly useful with courses covering evolving topics, in an attempt to keep course users as up-to-date as possible.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Administration / Archive support

Depending on the edition, when you delete a user, lesson or course, it is automatically moved to an archive folder in order to avoid loss of valuable data.

The administrator then has the option to fully restore or permanently delete the data and free up storage space, as shown above.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

Administration / LDAP support

LDAP support and an extensive XML API, provide the means to communicate with other systems. In conjunction with other administrative features, allows for the creation of a secure environment e.g. where you can restrict the IP addresses that have access to the system.

Community++

No

Educational Yes

Enterprise Yes

eFront commercial editions / eFront Enterprise

eFront Enterprise combines the functionalities explored below to those offered in the Educational edition. Tailored with larger organizations and companies in mind, it offers solutions for the management of their most valued asset – their employees. Based on a coherent approach to human capital management which keeps the workforce actively engaged, the eFront Enterprise platform offers the means of aligning learning programs with business goals to cultivate employee skills and knowledge associated with business performance.

Enterprise Suite / Track job placements

Allows for job specific searches and/or in conjunction with branch location i.e. specific job roles in specific branch locations. It also allows for skill specific searches or a search of employees within a specific job role across all branches.

Community++

No

Educational No

Enterprise Yes

Enterprise Suite / Branch management

Provides a quick overview of all branches, their location details, number of employees at each branch and where each branch reports to. By selecting a particular branch, further information such as employee details and job positions can be viewed, thus yielding conclusive information in an effective manner.

Community++

No

Educational No

Enterprise Yes

Enterprise Suite / Branch Supervisor Role

Supervisors are considered as the administrators of their branch, with privileged access to features and control of users, within that branch. Branch supervisors have access to the categories shown above, and each category has numerous options e.g. add/delete users, assign users to job roles or courses, add/delete job positions, create groups of users, plus many more. Branch Supervisors are able to access these options from their homepage via an organization link.

Community++

No

Educational No

Enterprise Yes

Enterprise Suite / Skills management

Skills are easily created and categorised, and assigned to users once they have fulfilled certain criteria, e.g. pass a specific test associated with a skill, or can be assigned by the administrator directly if a user already possesses the skill.

Community++

No

Educational No

Enterprise Yes

Enterprise Suite / Competency management

This allows for a search of various skills, simultaneously required to perform certain tasks e.g the three skills searched above matched only two user’s skill-sets and thus their competency in performing desired task.

Community++

No

Educational No

Enterprise Yes

Enterprise Suite / Employee transcripts

An example of an employee transcript showing evaluation remarks by supervisors on their performance and achievements.

Community++

No

Educational No

Enterprise Yes

Enterprise Suite / Employee transcripts

An example of an employee transcript showing overall and individual test scores (and date test was taken) plus lessons and courses the user has already completed.

Community++

No

Educational No

Enterprise Yes

Enterprise Suite / Managing users

Users can be managed by branch or job position, as shown above, but also by location and department.

Community++

No

Educational No

Enterprise Yes

Enterprise Suite / Assign courses based on job role

This ensures users are automatically enrolled into courses and lessons depending on their job role e.g. Business Development Managers will automatically be enrolled into the courses shown above.

Community++

No

Educational No

Enterprise Yes

Enterprise Suite / Skill based search

Allows for skill based searches across the whole organization, a particular branch or within a specific job position i.e. in the above example, 3 people within the whole organization have the experience in managing people skill.

Community++

No

Educational No

Enterprise Yes

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