Technical FAQs

Post-secondary schools look very different this year as colleges and universities embrace both blended learning and online-only approaches to content delivery and engagement. But this isn’t a one-off operation. Even as pandemic pressures ease, the shift to distance learning as the de facto solution for many students won’t disappear.  As a result, it’s critical for schools to develop and deploy learning management systems (LMSs) that both meet current needs and ensure they’re capable of keeping up with educational evolution. But what does this look like in practice? How do developers and team leaders build fully-functional LMS solutions that empower student success without breaking the bank?

Learning Management Systems (LMS) Challenges

When schools first made the shift to distance learning directives, speed was of the essence. While students were barred from campus for safety reasons, they’d paid for a full semester of instruction, and schools needed to deliver. As a result, patchwork programs became commonplace. Colleges and universities combined existing education software with video conferencing and collaboration tools to create “good enough” learning models that got them through to summer break. Despite best educational efforts, however, some students still went after schools with lawsuits, alleging that the quality of instruction didn’t align with tuition totals.

So it’s no surprise that as fall semesters kick off, students aren’t willing to put up with learning management systems that barely make the grade. They want full-featured distance learning that helps them engage with instructors and connect with new content no matter how, where, or when they access campus networks. 

As a result, development teams can’t simply correct for current COVID conditions. Instead, they need to create systems that deliver both blended and purely online interactions, and have the power to ensure students that choose to continue with digital-first learning can still stay connected even after returns to campus become commonplace.

How to Create a Functional LMS Framework

So what does a fully-functional LMS framework look like in practice? Six features are critical for ongoing success. Let’s explore how these features can enhance your learning management system and set your end-users up for success in the classroom and at home:

Diverse Document Viewing

As schools make the shift to distance learning, the ability to view multiple document types is critical for long-term LMS success. From standard Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to more diverse image types — such as those used in medical educational programming or manufacturing courses — students and instructors need the ability to both send and view diverse document types on-demand. 

While both free and paid solutions for viewing exist outside LMS ecosystems, choosing this route creates two potential problems. Students with diverse technological and economic backgrounds may face challenges in finding and using these tools, and data security may be compromised. This is especially critical as schools handle greater volumes of students’ personal and financial information. If document viewing happens outside internal systems, private concerns become paramount.

In-Depth Annotations

With students now submitting assignments and exams via educational software, viewing isn’t enough. Staff also need the ability to annotate assets as they arrive. Here, professors and teaching assistants are best-served by built-in tools that allow them to quickly redline papers or projects, add comments, highlight key passages, and quickly markup documents with specific instructions or corrections. 

Without this ability, staff have two equally unappealing choices. They can either print out, manually correct, and then re-scan documents, or send all comments as separate email attachments. Both are problematic, since they limit the ability of students and teachers to easily interact with the same document.

Comprehensive Conversion

File conversion is critical for effective learning management systems (LMSs). Specifically, schools need ways to quickly convert multiple document types into single, searchable PDFs. Not only do PDFs offer the ability to control who can edit, view, or comment on papers or exams, they make it easy for teachers to quickly find specific content. The permissions-based nature of PDFs makes them ideal for post-secondary applications and a must-have for any education software solution. 

Cutting-Edge OCR and ICR

Optical character recognition and intelligent character recognition also forms a key part of distance learning directives. With some students still more comfortable with hand-written hard copies and some classes that require students to show specific work, OCR can help bridge the gap between form and function. By integrating tools with the ability to recognize and convert multiple character types and sets, schools are better equipped to deal with any document type. Search is also bolstered by cutting-edge OCR; instead of forcing staff to manually examine documents for key data, OCR empowers digital discovery.

Complete Data Capture

Forms are a fundamental part of university and college life — but the myriad of digital documents can quickly overwhelm legacy education software. Integrating tools with robust form-field detection allow schools and staff to streamline the process of complete data capture, both increasing the speed of information processing and reducing the potential for human error.

Barcode Benefits

As campuses shift to hybrid learning models, students occupy two worlds, both physical and digital. But this duality introduces complexity when it comes to tracking who’s on campus, when, and why. These are currently key metrics for schools looking to keep students safe in the era of social distancing. 

By deploying full-featured barcode scanning solutions as part of LMS frameworks, colleges and universities can get ahead of this complexity curve. From scanning ID cards to take attendance and track resource use to using barcodes as no-contact purchase points or metric measurements for ongoing analytics, barcode solutions are an integral part of LMS solutions.

Automation Advantages

The sheer volume of digital documents now generated and handled by post-secondary schools poses the problem of practicality. Teachers and administrators simply don’t have time to evaluate and enter data at scale and speed while also ensuring accuracy. By automating key processes including document conversion, capture, and character recognition, schools can reduce the time required to process documents, leaving more room for student engagement.

Building an LMS Product for Teachers & Students

The bottom line for LMS solutions? If they don’t work for end-users, they won’t work for the broader school system as a whole. Gone are the days of invisible IT infrastructure. Now, students and staff alike are school stakeholders with evolving expectations around technology.

By deploying distance learning solutions that prioritize end-user outcomes with enhanced document viewing, editing, data capture, and automation, developers can create LMS tools capable of both solving immediate issues and offering sustained student success over time. Learn more about these functionality integrations for your learning management system at accusoft.com/products. 

Docubee is a great no-code platform for automating your business processes. If you are a developer, we offer several ways to integrate Docubee directly into your site with straightforward APIs, and a few lines of code. If that isn’t your speed, no worries! You can learn more about how you can use Docubee code free here. Otherwise, read on!

You’ve got your perfect website and your customers know and love your unique style. With Docubee, it’s easy to use your own forms to collect data and much more. With additional effort, you could even send documents hosted on your site to Docubee and auto-populate them with data collected in a form.

To demonstrate a very simple use-case, here is a survey form in Docubee which can be used to collect and track response data. The Docubee workflow will be a very simple two step process – a web form and email step. Check out how to create a workflow template here.

The Docubee Workflow

Using Docubee’s fast form creator, it was easy to create a simple survey form.

Once created and published, the workflow’s form can be directly linked via URL for collecting survey data, or it can be submitted from your own site by initiating a POST request. This way you don’t need to worry about storing the data. Docubee allows you to track and export all responses.

Each field in the workflow designer has a Field Label and Property Name. The label is what shows up on the Docubee web form, and the Property Name is what the response data corresponds with in the Docubee dashboard.

So far, there are six “Single-Line Text” fields on the form, five of which have a data type of text and one of type e-mail.

(Label / Property Name)

• What is your favorite product? / Favorite_Product
• Why did your purchase this product? / Why_Purchase_Product
• How satisfied are you with this product? / Product_Satisfaction
• Would you recommend this product to a friend? / Recommend_Product
• Would you recommend this company to a friend? / Recommend_Company
• Your Email / Respondent_Email

The property name is also how the data is stored in the POST request body to Docubee that initiates the workflow.

The Docubee API

The workflow can be initiated from your site by having your form post to custom route on your server. The handler behind that route needs to format your forms response data to POST to the workflow instances API endpoint:

POST - https://docubee.app/api/v1/workflowInstances
Content-Type: application/json
Request Body
{
  "wfModelId": "yourModelIdHere",
  "wfData": {
    "Favorite_Product": "yourDataHere",
    "Why_Purchase_Product": "yourDataHere",
    "Product_Satisfaction": "yourDataHere",
    "Recommend_Product": "yourDataHere",
    "Recommend_Company": "yourDataHere",
    "Respondent_Email": "yourDataHere"
  }
}

Response
Content-Type: application/json
{
  "wfInstanceId": "instance-id",
  "redirectUrl": "url-if-there-is-a-next-workflow-step"
}

After a successful POST request, the workflow will be initiated with the data and a thank you email would be automatically sent to the email contained in the “Respondent_Email” property.

The survey responses can be tracked in the Docubee Dashboard under the “COMPLETED” instances tab.

All survey results can also be exported to a CSV file using the “Export Workflows” button.

Example CSV Export:

Docubee can be used for a wide variety of different use cases, from something as simple as collecting survey data, to more advanced use-cases requiring documents hosted on your site to be automatically populated with data.

Reach out today to schedule a demo, or to get started integrating Docubee’s other powerful APIs into your product. For more advanced use-cases our Professional Services team would be more than happy to assist.

Check out more here.

Landon Lamb, Software Engineer III – Docubee Team

Landon started out as a Software Engineer in Support at Accusoft in July 2016. In April of 2017, he transitioned onto the Docubee team initially as a Workflow Developer.

Currently, Landon is a Software Engineer III and works on the front end site, the back end services, and the product’s build pipeline. He enjoys helping deliver new features to Docubee’s growing user base.

Many organizations utilize spreadsheets to track data and perform complex calculations. Since spreadsheets offer substantial flexibility, it’s not uncommon for a single organization to use them in a variety of ways. For instance, one department might use them for budgeting while another deploys them for risk assessment. Although they can handle complex calculations, spreadsheets are relatively easy to set up and don’t require the same programming knowledge as more specialized solutions. That accessibility has led many organizations to simply convert Excel to web applications using API integrations rather than building new functionality from scratch.

Why You Should Convert Excel Files to Web Applications

Consumers often turn to financial and insurance companies looking for simple answers to simple questions: 

• How many payments will it take to eliminate my debt?
• Will adding another person to my insurance policy change my rate?
• What will the monthly payments on my loan cost based on different interest rates?

To answer questions like these, someone in the organization typically enters the customer’s data into a premade spreadsheet, applies a few conditions using preset formulas, and shares the result. This process could be significantly streamlined by making these calculations readily available as a web application to anyone who visits the firm’s website, allowing both prospective and current customers to get answers quickly while also freeing up time for employees to work on more high-value tasks.

Unfortunately, building a secure, functional web application takes up valuable development resources. A developer could easily spend weeks converting complex spreadsheet formulas into a fully-functional application that integrates into the website or larger platform seamlessly. Even worse, if anything about those formulas were to change (as is often the case with financial and insurance formulas), more development resources will need to be pulled away from existing projects to make the updates.

By converting Excel files to web applications, firms can avoid these problems and provide clients with ready access to the calculations they need. FinTech and InsurTech developers can accommodate this need by building integrations into their solutions that allow users to easily upload and share spreadsheets entirely within an application and without any Microsoft Word dependencies. This bypasses the time-consuming build process and makes it much easier to update the formulas as needed.

Keeping Your Spreadsheets Secure

Of course, making spreadsheets readily available as web applications presents a few important security challenges. Many of the calculations running inside an organization’s spreadsheets are proprietary or contain hidden data that needs to remain private for various confidentiality reasons. That’s why companies are hesitant to simply send copies of their internal spreadsheets to customers or vendors. If those Excel files are made accessible online, there’s an obvious risk that someone could download a copy for themselves or access valuable private intellectual property.

Incidentally, this is also the reason why many firms struggle with sharing spreadsheets even in a collaborative environment. Not only are .XLSX files among the most commonly used file extensions by malware, but granting cloud providers or email servers access to spreadsheets represents too great a security risk for companies in heavily regulated industries.

By converting Excel to web applications, however, organizations can maintain strict access and visibility controls over their spreadsheet files. A good spreadsheet viewer integration will allow users to determine what people see when they use the application and also what information they can access. Formulas and calculations that contain vital intellectual property can be hidden completely. Visitors can be restricted to only editing cells that apply to their information, allowing them to use the spreadsheet without breaking or altering its functionality.

Sharing controls can also restrict what can be downloaded locally. A visitor may need to download or print a copy of their calculations, but they don’t need to download a fully functional copy of the spreadsheet file. Even in a collaborative environment, allowing people to download and edit copies of a spreadsheet can introduce significant version confusion. By keeping everything safely within the confines of the organization’s larger web application, essential data remains as secure and up-to-date as possible.

Other Reasons to Convert Excel to Web Applications

The versatility of spreadsheets allows people to adapt them to a variety of uses. In addition to more traditional budgeting and adjustment tasks, they can also be used for things like calculating survey results, analyzing resource usage, or estimating server uptime. Adding customizable calculators that provide quick results to a website experience can provide customers with important information and keep them engaged. 

Rather than building a specialized app or plug-in for every one of these calculators, organizations can simply use a spreadsheet viewer integration to quickly create one without any specialized coding or development knowledge. When the integration is set up within their solution, they can even customize it to match their branding and make it look more like a designed application than a simple spreadsheet.

Explore the Potential of Spreadsheet Integration with PrizmDoc Cells

Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Cells was originally designed to help our clients securely view and share XLSX files without any third party dependencies, but it’s increasingly being used to help improve customer experiences across a variety of applications. Get a hands-on experience with this API-driven integration to explore the potential of converting your Excel files to web applications. For a more detailed overview of what you can do with PrizmDoc Cells, sign up for a free trial.