The Royal BC Museum Learning Portal is an interactive online learning resource for learners of all ages, but primarily aimed at BC students and teachers. Its purpose is to share the stories of BC as told through the work of the Royal BC Museum and Archives. Featuring beautiful images, compelling articles and a wide range of audio and video content, the Learning Portal encourages engagement and curiosity.
The Challenge
The RBCM Learning Portal was a significant undertaking when it was first developed. Over time, the tool evolved and more functionality was added. Due to the volume of iterations, the portal became fractured with design and UX inconsistencies throughout the site. Overall, it became a challenge to update and maintain and to ensure proper coding and security standards were always achieved. The Learning Portal evolved from a public information portal into a program resource for students from surrounding schools.
The Solution
Caorda has enjoyed a long-standing business relationship with the Royal BC Museum, assisting them with projects over the last several years. We were fortunate to come through their RFP process and won the opportunity to re-structure and rebuild their Online Learning Portal. We were excited to get going on this project because who doesn’t love the Museum!
Our team proceeded with structure and planning, ensuring that we had every detail ironed out and on paper before a line of code was written. This was essentially a ‘frame-up’ restoration, starting from scratch. With the requirements complete, we then worked with the RBCM team to develop their perfect homepage experience. Bearing in mind that their target visitors were school-age children (and their parents). We assisted in identifying and defining 4 unique user roles and build these access permissions into the platform.
A key feature of the portal was the ability for student accounts to create ‘playlists’ of grouped content that they could accumulate and publish as a new page to share. The published ‘playlist’ would go through a short approval process by a museum staff member who would flick the switch to allow it out onto the live website. Like this: https://learning.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/playlist/salmon-in-bowker-creek/.
There are layers of security in the new platform that protects the account information of minors and a significantly more robust site search to allow anyone to locate anything that the museum portal has to offer. The Caorda team officially launched the new Learning Portal in September, 2019.
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