Experts LMS platform for Government Agency

The client is The National Agency for Higher Education Quality Assurance (NAQA), a national accreditation authority for universities’ educational programs.

Our client is a Governmental Agency responsible for the educational accreditation of Higher Education institutions. The Agency has an association of experts to run the accreditation process in different educational institutions’ academic fields.

One of the key central business processes of the Agency is to keep a register of its experts. The other one, which is very important as well, is the business process of submitting applications to be the candidate to expert.

Due to a significant increase in the certification requests to the Agency and, accordingly, substantial growth in the number of experts and information support for business processes, our client has been required to develop a new, more efficient Business Process Automation platform (BPA) in compliance with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education.

Since our client is a governmental structure, we had a fixed budget and clear timeframes for platform development. It was also necessary to build a simple-to-use and easy-to-learn platform for users of any level of computer skills.

The project’s MVP considers automation for the business process that focuses on information about experts working on the accreditation of educational programs. This process includes a dataset from submitting candidates’ applications to maintaining records on participating experts. It also has a possibility of filtering by specific expertise in accreditations with feedback from educational institutions on the quality of work of the experts.

As a result, Quantum met all the client’s requirements and developed the platform with a few vital for its users features:

• Matching the experts with the educational programs they are applying to review. Therefore, the system selects the most suitable experts for each educational program.
• The same algorithm is used to detect and avoid situations that may potentially result in a conflict of interest since the accreditation process should be led by independent experts.

During the stages of platform development, Quantum implemented all the features usually required for the BPA class information systems:

• workflow support with user notification on the events they need to know or need to react to;
• pre-moderated changes to the information stored in the system;
• experts’ cabinets where they can update the information on themselves;
• multi-criteria filtering and full-text search to be able to find the required information quickly;
• integration with the existing corporate-wide users’ directory to authorize the system users;
• tracking of all the changes made on an expert’s profile, when and who made these changes;
• the ability to delete experts’ data on demand due to data protection reasons.

To develop the front-end part, we used JavaScript and React.JS.

The back-end part was built on Python and its Django framework.

Also, we used the Django REST framework for building web API.

Other significant tools and services used for developing a platform were: PostgreSQL, Docker, Azure Active Directory, Django Microsoft, and Selenium.