Feature Request - Will Pay!

Hi,
I am not an expert in LMS and have never used moodle but I have a pre-sales type question on functionality that I am sure you guys may be able to help me with. :lol:

The question is about the functionality of Joomla, Moodle, Joomdle and VirtueMart and whether the configuration I have in mind for all of these working together is possible.

The idea is that a bunch of moodle courses will be developed that will be marketed to businesses. Each business will then be able to subscribe based on the number of employees they have and the number of courses they want. For example they may be charged a monthly fee for 5 employees to access 3 courses on the website. They will also be allowed to unsubscribe employees from one course and switch them to another - for example after they have successfully completed their original course. They should also be able to change the subscription plan so that they can upgrade to 10, 20, 50 or more employees for a higher fee. Or they may upgrade to more courses so 6, 10, 20 or more. Or they may wish to do both - more courses for more employees. In other words matrix based pricing! :huh:

To get this to work the business owner would need a management console where they can control their own employees and subscription settings. Obviously they wouldn't be able to see other businesses settings, employee details, or course subscriptions.

Each employee would complete the courses that their business enrolled them on although the ability to pick courses for themselves may be also required. The key is to ensure the employee and business stays within their subscription limits - in this example 5 employees with 3 courses each. So if they try and subscribe to a 4th course they can't.

So my question is could this be done with Joomla, Moodle, Joomdle and VirtueMart working together or is there an add-on of some description that could help me do this? If not, any suggestions of how I could achieve this? I am willing to pay for these extra features so I don't have an issue commissioning someone to do this work. Any suggestions where I could find an expert that could provide a quote for this work?

Thanks for the help!

In summary, yes and no

To achieve the primary concept you would use the "Parents" feature whereby the "Parent" would purchase courses for their "children". In your case the parents would obviously be the HR department / boss or whoever from the company and the child would be the employee.

The challenge would be your matrix pricing structure. Perhaps an approach would be to use a subscription system with points. The employer would purchase x quantity of points, billed online or directly to your bank, and then either the employer or the employee would register for courses utilising y number of points.

Of course the exact details of what you are looking for would need to be scoped and compared against the current functionality. For example what does the management console look like. Typically, employers would want to see employee usages, utilisation of points, length of time in the course, marks if there are assessments, etc.

Can Joomla, Moodle, Joomdle, VM do this. In general I would say yes. Based upon a points system, you would want to look at one to the tools to manage points. There are a number of them available (that work with VM already) and while the integration does not exist today, we have discussed it previously and don't think this would be a massive task. In fact, I would think your custom management console may take more effort. Of course this would only be known once the exact requirements are defined.

Chris

Thanks for the reply Chris, it sounds encouraging.

However, one of the important factors for the project is the subscription system. The fee needs to come off as a reoccurring subscription each month. The whole business model for the website is going to based round people subscribing so this part is very important.

One of the other things that I didn't mention that adds extra complications to the pricing is that there will be a setup fee - plus we will also ask for 3 months payment in advance - so the subscription payments wouldn't kick in until the end of month 3.

The concept of points does sound interesting but I'm not sure if it would fit in with our concept. Let me see if I have got the concept of points right - the Employer buys the points and then allocates them to the employees. One question is what happens when they use up all their points? Would the employer normally have to buy more points or could they be reset at the end of the completion of a course and reallocated back to the employer. For example if an employer subscribed to '5 employees x 3 courses each' they would get a total of 15 points (allocated 3 per person). The employer then enrolls 1 employee to 3 courses leaving 12 point to use up on other employees. Once the employee completes the 3 courses the points are reset back to 15. So the points are temporarily allocated out of the employers pool when a course has been enrolled and released back into the pool after completion. Would something like that be possible?

If so, we could charge for the subscription monthly as we wanted. The only extra thing that would need to be built in would be a method of limiting how the points are spent. In other words we don't want the 15 points spent by 1 employer on 1 employee doing 15 courses. They would need to be limited to 3 courses per employee - or whatever the plan their on limits them to.

The employee console doesn't need to be complicated. Basically it would be a system to allow the employer to manage the subscription or points - so they need to be able to add or delete employees and also allow them to allocate courses to them. We haven't really thought about any functionality beyond that but some of the features you mentioned sound like good ideas. I'll have a think about that tho - so thanks for those excellent ideas!

Having not used this software before I'm not sure if what I am proposing is possible so any tips would be great. Thanks for the great advice so far - it's been really useful!

Just a quick reply. Many of the subscription / points tools will allow for recurring subscriptions.

Regardless, let me speak discuss this internally and come back to you with some ideas. Give us until next week as we are both engaged over the next few days.

Chris

Thanks Chris! If you want more information feel free to PM me and I can give you some contact details.

One final thing I just realised that I didn't mention was that the courses are being developed by industry professionals who will be paid based on the number of people that take their courses. So there would need to be a reporting system that shows how many people took each course on a month by month basis. I'm not sure if this type of thing is a standard moodle feature so I thought I'd best mention it!

Nice feature to have. I think this could benefit teachers in general. I wonder though, is it a feature for Joomla or Moodle. My first thought is Moodle since they will need to create, manage, courses etc from Moodle anyway. Unless you do not expect the course creators to be in Moodle and you guys will manage the creation of courses etc. Then they could just go to Joomla. Really depends on the activities these folks need to cary out.

I think we will create the content on Moodle - based on the supplied information from the creators - so I guess it's a Joomla function based on your description.

Hi Chris,
Have you had a chance to think about this yet? Really keen to get the ball rolling on this project so hopefully you can come up with a proposal and price soon!



If you have any more questions please don't hesitate to get in touch.

I need a very similar system for a project coming up which also has finance behind it - so very interested. I can send you the process flow but one of the complicating factors in our model is the person buys a subscription to the site, then they can buy 'credits' for courses for their staff, and they can also buy other physical goods, in the same transaction.

My concern is that the IPN comes back to Joomdle (from memory) so I'm not sure how this would work with VM and selling more than just courses.

Ruth