Engineering the product learnir and my experience so far

Post by Henry Asante on April 6, 2022

Building Learnir has been a fufilling experience of bringing together everything i have learnt in the past 7 years.

Learning experiences platforms is ever better than before, but still has its challenges.

With learnir - i wanted to build something that truly scales to meet the ever growing demands of LMS systems.

Learnir is my first principles approach to building a learning experience platform. So what does it entail?

First to get an idea of what is involved in a learning experience (Academy, Course website etc) - It had to be broken down:

  • The Content itself & Managing it - We needed to introduce a system to manage the content. This is where the Learning Content System comes in.
  • The learning webapp - This is where the student, customer, learner would take a sit to consume the created content.
  • Reporting the impact of learning - This is the backbone of the platform. It is the system that enables Education managers to justify the existence of a learning portal.

To create learnir to support infinite scale - It had to be easily extensible and not defined by my constraints - yet approachable to first time users.

Headless is that kind of approach that enables this, but it also has its limits.

First we need to understand LMS systems is mostly used by LMS Administrators - with external support by their engineers etc. But for the most part its only them.

So we need something that creates a bridge between them and their external collaborators.

We introduced a workflow to solve this.

By breaking down the workflow and creating the solutions for it - we enabled a very extensive platform that scales.

The workflow is as follows:

  • The Education manager creates their content
  • Is quickly able to deploy a template in Learnir Cloud
  • The template is then made available to the Engineer to customize in direct fashion (Like you would any other web app).
  • This is further easily interchangable - i.e not depending on each other - As templates is open source and Leanir cloud is a full fledged optional deployment center in house.

We then create solutions for these in the products we here